
Wes Clark in 2002
'Wesley Allison Clark' (b. 1927) is a
computer scientist and one of the main participants, along with
Charles Molnar, in the creation of the
LINC laboratory computer, which was the first
mini-computer and shares with a number of other computers (such as the
PDP-1) the claim to be the inspiration for the
personal computer.
Clark was born in
New Haven, Connecticut and grew up in northern California. He graduated from the
University of California, Berkeley in 1947, and received an
electrical engineering degree from
MIT in
1955. Clark worked for
Washington University from 1964–72, and as a consultant thereafter. He founded Clark, Rockoff, and Associates in
Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Maxine Rockoff. His oldest son, Douglas, is a professor of computer science at
Princeton University.
The
New York Times series on the history of the personal computer had this to say in an article on
August 19,
2001 "How the Computer Became Personal":
In the pantheon of personal computing, the LINC, in a sense, came first—more than a decade before Ed Roberts made PC's affordable for ordinary people. Work started on the Linc, the brainchild of the M.I.T. physicist Wesley A. Clark, in May 1961, and the machine was used for the first time at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, MD, the next year to analyze a cat's neural responses.
Each Linc had a tiny screen and keyboard and comprised four metal modules, which together were about as big as two television sets, set side by side and tilted back slightly. The machine, a 12-bit computer, included a one-half megahertz processor. Lincs sold for about $43,000—a bargain at the time—and were ultimately made commercially by Digital Equipment, the first minicomputer company. Fifty Lincs of the original design were built.
Clark had a small but key role in the planning for the
ARPANET (the predecessor to the
Internet). He suggested to
Larry Roberts the idea of using separate small
computers (later named
Interface Message Processors) as a way of standardizing the network interface and reducing load on the local computers.
When Al Rodbell, who lived across the hall from Clark for a decade, found out who his self effacing neighbor was, he shook his head and said, "If only I had known, I would have treated him with a lot more respect; and asked him for a lot more help with my computer."
In 1981 Clark received the
Eckert-Mauchly Award for his work on computer architecture. He was elected to the
National Academy of Engineering in 1999.
References
★
Wesley Clark article in ''Smart Computing Encyclopedia''