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The following is excerpted from Canada’s – and York’s – connection to first PC detailed in new book by Sandra McLean.
At one time, computers were thought to be large brains too complex for the average person to understand, never mind use or own for their personal use, says York Professor Zbigniew Stachniak, standing in a cramped room on the second floor of the Lassonde Building surrounded by tall shelves of outdated computers and computer remnants.
That small room with its window display of ancient computers is easy to miss, but it boasts one of the world’s first personal computers, the MCM/70 microcomputer, as one of its artifacts. Stachniak, as the York University Computer Museum’s curator, possesses a mental encyclopedia of fascinating historical and computer details.
“In April 1965, Time magazine ran ‘The Computer in Society’ story with a picture of a computer drawn as a big brain on the cover. At that time, computers were mostly hidden from us and we, the society, were most ignorant about them,” says Stachniak, a professor in York’s Department of Computer Science & Engineering in the Faculty of Science & Engineering.
All that changed in 1973 when Toronto- and Kingston-based company Micro Computer Machines Inc., with Mers Kutt at the helm, designed and manufactured a computer for personal use. With its tiny built-in screen and keyboard, the MCM/70 challenged the computing status quo around the world.
The history of that early personal computer, the vision behind it and the innovations it brought to the world, can be found in Stachniak’s recent book, Inventing the PC: The MCM/70 Story (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011). It looks not only at the history, politics, business and social issues surrounding the invention of the MCM/70, but at its Canadian, as well as York University connection.
To learn more about Inventing the PC, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
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