Upcoming (Fall 2008) Article for IEEE Annals of The History of Computing:
The LINC @ 45: A Paradigm Shift in 1962
Contributed by Severo Ornstein and Bruce Damer
Figure 1: The LINC restoration team assembled at
the Digibarn. From left to right: Tom Chaney (standing), Scott Robinson, Maury
Pepper and Severo Ornstein (seated), Jerry Cox, Mary Allen
Wilkes (standing), Gerald Johns (behind), Wes Clark (seated), Allan
Lundell (seated in front) and Bruce Damer, who was born in 1962 (leaning on far
right). Picture courtesy Maxine Rockoff.
The LINC computer was designed by Wesley A. Clark and Charles E.
Molnar at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory in 1962. They were assisted by a team of a
dozen or so people under
Clark's leadership
(three of whom are pictured in Figure 1 above). Over ensuing years nearly a
hundred LINCs were built for use in medical research before the design was
absorbed into the DEC PDP-12.
In a recent email correspondence with Alan Kay, he wrote:
I've always considered the LINC to be the
first real personal computer. There were single user small machines before, but
none of them had the combinations of I/O (display, keyboard, etc.) and low cost
of the LINC. The feel of the LINC was the feel of personal computing… The LINC
could actually be built by its owner (that's how the first few were made) and
cost about $20K. So, in today's terms, it would be a "workstation".
Wes [
Clark]'s paper for the ACM History of
Workstations conference had the modest title "The LINC Was Early And
Small" (Goldberg 1988).
Despite this
distinction, by the year 2000 the LINC was largely forgotten, overwhelmed by
the tide of attention given to later developments that brought computers into a
broader public consciousness. In an effort to remind people of the LINC's
seminal importance, Severo Ornstein, one of the original design team
members, wrote a book in 2002 entitled Computing In The Middle Ages. It told
the story of the LINC's development and attempted to set it in its historical
context.
At a meeting in
St Louis in the spring
of 2004, Ornstein learned that around 1980, when the LINCs became obsolete,
Scott Robinson, one of the technicians who had worked on the machines at
Washington
University, had had the foresight to
sequester several of them in his garage. He paid three dollars apiece for them.
Two years later, during a tour of the
Digibarn
Computer
Museum in the Bay Area of
Northern California, Ornstein met Bruce Damer, the owner/director of this
unique facility. He asked Damer whether he knew about the LINC, and suggested
that it was, in fact, the great-granddaddy of all the personal computers
in his museum's collection. After reading Ornstein's book, Damer expressed keen
interest in obtaining a LINC for the Digibarn and in hosting a 45th anniversary event in honor of the LINC and its original
team the following year.
Remembering the LINCs in the
St.
Louis garage, Ornstein contacted Robinson who
generously offered to give a machine to the Digibarn. Ornstein then contacted
several other former Washington University colleagues (Tom Chaney, Maury
Pepper, and Gerald Johns) and cajoled them into working with Robinson to get
one of his machines actually working again — after twenty some years in his
garage.
These stalwarts began working on
resurrecting a LINC early in 2007. This required moving the machine to a
reasonable work space and removing the detritus of twenty years (mouse nests,
etc.) before the real work could begin. Bringing the machine back to life
required enormous effort and all the participants generously donated their
time. The often amusing details of the resuscitation may be found, together
with numerous pictures, at the Digibarn web site – http://www.digibarn.com. A
deadline was established when Damer decided that the revived LINC should be
featured at the 10th annual Vintage Computer Festival (VCF) to be held at the
Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California in November of 2007.
While the resuscitation was going on in
St. Louis,
efforts were under way to gather funds to pay for moving the machine to
California. In the
end the costs were covered by contributions from the participants and
generous individuals involved with the LINC in the 1960s including Gordon Bell.
As with all such endeavors, the final crucial parts of the computer,
the tape units, didn't begin working until the very last minute, so the
St. Louis crew worked
furiously right up until the movers arrived. A few days later they were all on
hand at the CHM to provide last minute touches before the VCF began. As many as
possible of the original LINC team also arrived from all over the
USA
for the occasion.
Figure 2: The LINC as set up at the
Vintage Computer Festival in November 2007. The console is on the right with
screen and control knobs above it. On the left is the I/O unit with the tape
units above that. A few LINC tapes lie off to the side and the original
schematics can be seen on the far left. What is not shown is the
refrigerator-sized cabinet housing the electronics including 2,000 12-bit words
of core memory.
The machine worked perfectly throughout the entire event (see figure 2
above), and a special panel about the LINC was well received. Robinson was
repaid for his initial investment with some three dollar bills featuring his
own face which had been designed specifically for the occasion, and to the
delight of the entire team the LINC received the "Best in Show"
award. A celebratory banquet was held that night, and on the following day the
LINC was moved to its permanent home as part of the Digibarn collection. Still
working perfectly, it was installed in its own private room, where it was
signed ceremonially by the entire team of designers and resuscitators.
We
would like to close with some words from Digibarn founder and curator Bruce
Damer:
“With the
LINC included in our collection and in our oral history efforts, I feel
that the Digibarn’s mission to tell the story of interactive and personal computing
is in some sense now complete. As my association with the team that made the
LINC grew, I realized that these were the first people who understood the
importance of putting the power of a whole interactive computer in the hands of
a single person. This team, together with Charlie Molnar, Gordon Bell and many
others, bucked the timesharing trend of the early 1960s and helped create a
paradigm shift that influenced the development of the nascent minicomputer
industry, the design for the IMP that connected the ARPANET, interactive
computer graphics, and the very concept of a “personal” computer.
During
the presentation, Mary Allen Wilkes shared a photo of her programming the LINC’s
operating system with the whole system sitting in the living room of her
parents’ house in
Baltimore.
I asked her, “Mary Allen, were you therefore the first person to use a computer
in a private residence?” She replied, “Well, I guess I might have been…”. I
think that this one picture (Figure 3 below) expresses to me how important a
place the LINC occupies in the history of personal computing.
Figure 3: Mary Allen Wilkes
programming the LINC at her parents’ home in
Baltimore in 1965.
Resources and References
The
restoration of the LINC, its history and documentation, and the November 2007
event including demonstrations, interviews and complete video of a lively
panel, can all be found on the Digibarn site at:
http://www.digibarn.com/history/07-11-04-VCF10-LINC/index.html
Goldberg,
Adele, A History of Personal Workstations, ACM Press, 1988.
Back to our Pages on the LINC at the Digibarn
