Wesley A. Clark

This article is about the computer pioneer. For the US general, see Wesley Clark .

Wesley Allison Clark (born April 10, 1927 in New Haven , Connecticut , † February 22, 2016 ) was an American computer designer.

Life

Clark grew up in Northern California . He studied at the University of California, Berkeley , with a bachelor's degree in 1947 and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a master's degree in electrical engineering in 1955. There he designed the TX-0 (1956) and the TX with Ken Olsen -2 (1958), who were instrumental in the development of modern computers.

With Charles Molnar he developed the LINC (for Laboratory Instrument Computer) at the Lincoln Laboratory of MIT in 1961 . This was produced from 1964 by Digital Equipment and Spear Inc., now founded by Ken Olsen . They were used as laboratory computers at MIT - their first use was in 1962 at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland in neurological experiments with cats. They were relatively cheap then, around $ 40,000, and had a screen and keyboard. About 50 copies had been sold by 1969. The computer had a word length of 12 bits and 1 kB of memory (later 2 kB) and external memory in the form of a magnetic tape (LincTape). It is considered to be one of the first mini-computers (other early minis were the PDP-1 from 1959) and, like these, a forerunner of the personal computer .

He was also involved in the development of the Arpanet , which is considered the forerunner of the Internet . In 1967, he beat Larry Roberts in front, Interface Message Processor to use. From 1964 to 1972 he worked at Washington University (after the funding of the LINC at MIT ran out, he was brought there by George E. Pake ), at which he was also a consultant. With his wife Maxine Rockoff, he founded Clark, Rockoff and Associates in Brooklyn .

In 1981 he received the Eckert-Mauchly Award and in 1999 he became a member of the National Academy of Engineering . His eldest son, Douglas Clark, is a professor of computer science at Princeton University .

Fonts

• Clark: The LINC was early and small , in Adele Goldberg A history of personal workstations , ACM Press 1988, pp. 347-394
• BG Farley, WA Clark: Simulation of self-organizing systems by digital computer . IRE Transactions on Information Theory, 4 (1954) 76-84.

Web links

• Oral History Interview

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Wesley A. Clark, legendary computer engineer, dies at 88
2. ↑ Lights out for the last LINC, MIT ( Memento of the original from October 15, 2002 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . 
3. ^ Clark, Monar 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