In the summer of 1973, several MCM computers were on their European and North American promotional tours. The most interesting among them was the Executive -- a model of the MCM/70 computer in a briefcase and operated on batteries exclusively, a precursor to today's laptops. It was assembled in record short time for a demonstration at the APL Congress that was to take place in August at the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby, north of Copenhagen, Denmark. The company expected considerable marketing gains from the planned ground-breaking presentation of a never-seen-before luggable, battery operated, general-purpose computer, which they named the Executive.
The gamble payed off. On August 29, the day after the Executive's demonstration, the Danish daily Politiken published
a front-page article about a sensational computer from Canada. The article included two photographs depicting MCM employee
Edward Edwards operating the Executive on the doorstep of the auditorium where the conference took place.
In all modesty, a real sensation occurred yesterday when the International APL Congress was about to begin at the Technical University of Denmark.wrote Politiken.
When the buses with conference participants from 24 countries arrived from hotels in Copenhagen, he [Edwards] was sitting on the steps of an auditorium building solving complex problems on his data processing machine placed on his lap. Several experts who went by thought that the computer was a joke. Many stated that such a machine was impossible. But others who followed Ted Edwards' programming computations [...] admitted that the machine performed exactly as considerably larger IBM computers running APL and connected to an electrical outlet. There just wasn't any power cord attached to Ted Edwards' briefcase.
Shown in the exhibit: the MCM Executive.
Background image: Edward (Ted) Edwards, former MCM vice president in charge of planning, demonstrates the MCM Executive during a computer congress at the Technical University of Denmark in August 1973. This photograph, taken by Couchi Consulting Company, appeared on August 29th, 1973, in Danish daily Politiken.
