Nowadays we got technology for granted. We don’t think anymore about who invented what and how. We know digital is binary and that mobile uses waves but, I would say that’s pretty much it.
Well, the person responsible for starting the personal computer era, Wesley A. Clark, died last week at his home in Brooklyn. He was 88.
His work on the personal computer began in May 1961, when he led a team of M.I.T. engineers in developing the Laboratory Instrument Computer, or LINC.
The LINC represented a break from what at the time was a growing consensus in the computing world that the resources of computers should be shared. That design approach, known as “time-sharing,” connected multiple users to a single computer by rapidly switching the resources of the processor from user to user.
A LINC sold for about $43,000 — a bargain at the time — and Digital Equipment, the first minicomputer company, ultimately built them commercially, producing 50 of the original design.