On Tuesday November 14th, 2023 I was invited to an event at York University to celebrate "the momentous appearance of the MCM/70 computer - a technological marvel that offered an early glimpse of a new digital reality. "

MCM/70 @ 50 was organized by Zbigniew (“Ziggy”) Stachniak, curator of the York University Computer Museum and author of the definitive book on the subject "Inventing the PC - The MCM/70 Story" (highly recommended, a great read). The event marked the unveiling of a permanent exhibit in the Steacie Science and Engineering Library at York University, so that current and future York students will know Canada's contribution to the early days of the personal computer. It pays tribute to the makers of the MCM/70 for their hard work towards achieving that goal. The exhibit features a complete line of MCM computers, including an early engineering prototype, an MCM/70, and the only MCM Executive model ever produced. (The MCM Executive is third from the left in the picture below and you can see a picture of Ted Edwards above it demonstrating the MCM Executive during a computer congress in Denmark in August 1973. Many who first saw the Executive thought it was a hoax, a tribute to how advanced it really was.)

          From left to right: Engineering Prototype, MCM/70, MCM Executive, MCM System 800, MCM/900, MCM Micropower.

The exhibit is extremely well done. It clearly conveys a large amount of information in a relatively small amount of space. With all of the reflecting glass it's hard to get a photo that does justice to how good this exhibit really looks.

The event was well attended including a number of the principals from MCM that were responsible for creating the MCM/70 . 

One of those individuals who is pictured above on the far right of the first photo is Cam Farnell. Cam worked as a programmer while the MCM/70 was being developed. He also has an MCM/70 project here on Hackaday Rack8 MCM/70 rack machine replica.

Above is a photo of Zbigniew Stachniak delivering the opening address.

As if just being there wasn't enough, I was honored to be asked to bring my MCM/70 reproduction to the event and demonstrate the machine in action. I don't believe that the museum has any working MCM/70s and even if they did they would be too valuable to risk.

Above is a photo of my reproduction beside a real MCM/70. This was a very cool moment for me.

There was a fair amount of interest in the reproduction. I was actually pretty busy most of the time (but unfortunately don't have photos to prove it ;-)  

A couple of interesting notes: 

• Zbigniew Stachniak can be seen in the second photo from the left. I met "Ziggy's" wife and we had a short discussion on whether he looked more like Albert Einstein or Graham Nash (she thinks Nash).
• In the third frame from the left, the young man in the baseball cap (unfortunately I did not get his name) works for the government crunching data and producing complex charts and graphs exclusively using APL. He basically gave an APL masterclass using the reproduction to myself and some other onlookers. Quite impressive.
• In the rightmost frame I am having a discussion with Peter Jennings of Microchess and VisiCalc/VisiCorp fame. It turns out that Peter was/is a huge APL nerd. Around the time he was working on Microchess he wrote a 6502 assembler in APL. I think he had fun exercising his APL skills on the reproduction. 

For me it was a wonderful afternoon well spent. I met some great people and was honored to play a small part in this great event. Well done Ziggy.