Charles Molnar

Charles Edwin Molnar (born March 14, 1935 in Newark , New Jersey , † December 13, 1996 in Sunnyvale , California ) was an American computer designer and biophysicist .

Life

Molnar studied electrical engineering at Rutgers University with a bachelor's degree in 1956 and a master's degree in 1957. As a student, he developed the LINC computer (for Laboratory Instrument Computer) with Wesley A. Clark at the Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1961 . It is considered to be one of the first mini-computers (other early minis were the PDP-1 from 1959) and, like them, a forerunner of the personal computer . In 1966 he received his doctorate at MIT with a dissertation on numerical models for the functioning of the cochlea ( Model for the Convergence of Inputs Upon Neurons in the Cochlear Nucleus ). He used his LINC computer in his research on the cochlea.

Molnar was later with Clark at Washington University in St. Louis , where he was Associate Professor of Physiology and Biophysics in the Faculty of Medicine from 1965 and later Professor of Biomedical Computing, and in 1984 he was the founder and first director of the Institute for Biomedical Computing (IBC). In 1995 he left the university and worked for Sun Microsystems , including with Ivan Sutherland on pipeline architectures .

For the development of the LINC he received with Clark and in 1983 the award of the director of the National Institutes of Health .

Web links

• Charles E. Molnar: Obituary at Washington University in St. Louis. 2002(English). 
• John Markoff: Charles Molnar, 61, a Personal Computer Pioneer. In: New York Times. December 16, 1996 (English). 

Individual evidence

1. ^ Clark, Molnar The LINC , Annals New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 115, 1964, pp. 653-658, Clark, Molnar A Description of the LINC , in BD Waxman, R. Stacey (Eds.): Computers in Biomedical Research , Volume 2, Academic Press 1965