I first became associated with the LINC in 1964 when I took Washington
University's first hardware digital design class. The
instructors were Wes Clark and Jerry Cox. The LINC was
introduced as part of that course. The members of the class
designed, built, and de-bugged the "4W2" (Four Week Wonder),
a simple stand-alone personal computer. The I/O and tape storage
for the 4W2 was a LINC. I joined the Computer Research Lab (CRL)
directed by Wes Clark, in 1965. CRL was moving into a new
project, the Macromodule project. LINCs were used as our
personal computers during this effort. There were several
LINC-to-Macromodule interface units built. A lot of the early
metastablility test data I collected involved a mix of Macromodules to
do the high speed collection and a LINC to analyze and store the
results.
The LINC also served a personal role for me as a baby-setter. On
weekends when I was at work, my son Scott, then about 6 years old,
would sit in front of a LINC for hours, playing tic-tac-toe, drawing
pictures with an "etch-a-sketch" program, etc. There were
several games available on the LINC. In the early 1980's, as the LINCs
were being phased out, Scott, then about 14, even had a LINC in his
bedroom. (Tight fit). Scott now has a degree in Computer
Engineering and heads a hardware design and development consulting
company (STS Technologies) in St. Louis.
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Wesley A. Clark, NtG,* was the principal architect of the TX-0,
TX-2,
and LINC computers at MIT. He led the Macromodular Systems
Project
at Washington University in St. Louis, and has long been a
consultant
to SUN Microsystems Laboratories. Inventor of the digital
computer
and the Ferris Wheel and author of the widely unacclaimed How I
Built
a Pergola in Silicon Valley and Found God, he is currently
chairman
of the department of semantics and casuistry at Clark, Rockoff &
Associates in Brooklyn, New York.
* Not the General
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Jerry Cox is Senior Professor of Computer Science at Washington University. Forty-five years ago as a young Assistant Professor he applied to NIH for a grant to build a computer for an auditory physiology lab. He was astonished when it was awarded and by lucky chance encountered Wes Clark, Charlie Molnar and the prototype Linc at Lincoln Laboratory. Jerry and his graduate students built several Linc copies, started the Biomedical Computer Laboratory at the Washington University School of Medicine and applied the Lincs to monitoring electrocardiograms, to tracer kinetic studies and to regional cerebral blood flow measurement. He developed a Linc descendant which sprang from a computer (the 4W2) designed by a class that Wes and Jerry taught in the spring of 1965 and was applied, among other things, to radiation treatment planning, computer networking and, covertly, to the computer game, star wars.
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Gerald was working part time in a clinical/research
Otolaryngology Department while still in high school.
Almost everything was analog but there was the, rather
awful, Computer of Average Transients, which was a
primitive digital device. Transistors were in there! The lecture given by Jerry Cox in December
1963 at the
Central Institute for the Deaf demonstrated that the
LINC was clearly superior to anything else available
to the biomedical research community at the time.
Gerald got a job with the LINC group while they were
moving from Boston to St. Louis. Under the patient and
motivating tutelage of Charlie Molnar, Gerald created
many engineering and biomedical programs, and hardware designs
which were used to further some computer development,
teach medical students, and also to confuse bats. That one took a lot of hardware!
The opportunity to participate in the, at least partial,
resusitation of a LINC has been just fun.
Think of using a part of your brain that went dormant
over 30 years ago!
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Event Host: Severo M. Ornstein
Severo Ornstein is a mid-sized maverick who came to computing in 1954
with the aid of a climbing rope. The full story is told in his book
Computing In The Middle Ages which, among other things, is a paean
to the LINC computer on which he cut his hardware design teeth. Later,
he and another LINC pal had a heavy hand in devising Macromodules at
Washington University, after which he deserted the ranks to join the
team at BB&N in Boston which, somewhat to its surprise, was
shortly awarded the contract to build the first part of the Arpanet
(which eventually morphed into the Internet). That was a hard act to
follow, but, after leading the first delegation of computer scientists
to China in 1972, he escaped to Xerox PARC where - with the expert
help of true professionals - he helped to build an early laser printer
(the Dover) and an oversized personal computer (the
Dorado). On the side he helped found Computer Professionals For
Social Responsibility (CPSR) and designed the first screen-based
music score editor (Mockingbird), whereupon Xerox management
retired him to the hills where he designed and built a house. For the
last twenty years or so he has focused on musical endeavors and has
watched from the sidelines with bemused detachment as the computer
field rumbles along without him.
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Maury L. Pepper
Maury was at Washington University's Computer Systems Lab from 1967 to
1974. He became the librarian for LAP6 and developed some of the
modifications to LAP6. He was responsible for implementing some
minor LINC hardware fixes, and he designed the logic for the SuperLINC
- a Classic LINC which could access up to 32K of memory. He
co-authored with Charles Molnar a library of floating-point routines.
While at CSL, he was also involved in the development of Macromodules.
In 1975, he co-founded DRA Library Systems,
a company specializing in libraries for the blind and physically
handicapped. Later, he led a team which developed a system to monitor
radiation treatments for patient safety. His activity on the
MUMPS Development Committee led to the founding in 2002 of WorldVistA,
a non-profit organization which has taken VistA, the hospital software
developed by the VA, and make it available for doctors and hospitals
worldwide. Currently, he is a computer consultant with his own
company, M-Technology, and Chairman of WorldVistA.
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Scott Robinson joined the Computer Systems Laboratory of Washington
University in 1967 as an engineering assistant at the age of 20.
Over the course of many following years, he helped in extending the
LINC's utility to an increasing range of applications, as well as in
the assembly and modification of hardware for the Macromodular Systems
project. When CSL's LINCs were finally decommissioned, he
decided to buy several of them and keep them in his garage, where they
remained for more than twenty years. After helping to bring one
of these machines back to life, he is donating it to the Digibarn
Computer Museum, and his remaining three machines to the Vintage
Computer Festival collection.
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Mary Allen Wilkes is an arbitrator and practicing attorney in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In an earlier life she took up computer programming on a dare from her
eighth-grade geography teacher and because her undergraduate
philosophy degree had equipped her for precisely nothing at all.
During its design phase she simulated the LINC on the TX-2 computer at
MIT's Lincoln Laboratory. She also wrote many LINC operating
systems, all called LAP something-or-other, until calling it quits
with LAP6. She is the designer of the LINC console, the author
of the "LAP6 Handbook" and co-author, with Wesley A. Clark,
of "Programming the LINC." As part of the Macromodular
Systems Project at Washington University in St. Louis, she designed
the multiply macromodule - after which she traded in bits for writs
and went to law school