Posted on 02/23/2016 1:32:09 PM PST by nickcarraway
Wes Clark, the computer engineer whose work largely influenced the design of DEC minicomputers, CAD software, graphical user interfaces, and the ARPAnet, died Monday.
Wesley Allison Clark, a revered computer engineer whose work from the 1950s through 1970s underpinned the revolutions in personal computing, computer graphics, and the internet, died Monday. He was 88.
Clark trained in physics at the University of California / Berkeley and joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory in 1952. His first computer job was to test the nascent memory technology for MIT's Whirlwind, which was a vacuum tube computer for the U.S. Navy. By 1955 he co-invented the lab's TX-0 project, which built one of the first transistor computers. This set the course for Clark to influence the shape of an industry.
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In the 1960s, Clark moved to St. Louis and worked at Washington University, where he and another technical partner, Charles Molnar, developed the macromodule project. At first glance their work could be read as merely a way to assemble LEGO-like parts into full computers — which they did, on machines such as the LINC which advanced the ideas of truly personal computing even more than the MIT TX-class machines. But the LINC systems and macromodules also enabled modular computer networking. Clark in the early 1970s proposed using these technology packages as the basis for Interface Message Processors. Engineering firm Bolt Beranak and Newman implemented Clark's idea on Honeywell minicomputers as the backbone of the ARPAnet, which became the internet.
Clark was equally famous in computer circles for his sense of humor. He was known to joke that he's "Not the general," referring to retired Army man Wesley Kanne Clark who unsuccessfully tried for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004. Clark autographed a LINC computer at the Boulder Creek, Calif.-based DigiBarn computer museum, along with other LINC team members, and captioned it: "For whom the gong perhaps chimes."
"With his work in the late 1950s and 1960s designing the TX-0, the TX-2, and the LINC, Wes Clark created the first experience of what we today call 'personal, interactive computing,'" DigiBarn owner Bruce Damer told TechRepublic. "The LINC is considered to be the first workstation, built by the user from a kit, then transported to a lab, office, and even used in a home."
"A truly great man who humbly with humor, wit, and genius changed our world (and who would rap your knuckles for saying so)," Damer added, in a separate email to Clark's family and associates. "So for Wes, we chime the gong tonight."
Clark's visions continue today. His son Douglas, professor emeritus of computer science at Princeton University, works on computer architecture and artificial intelligence. Clark is also survived by wife Maxine.
I spoke to him on a number of occasions.
Very funny guy.
Hey Wes it’s me...Sir Orange!
RIP.
We will miss you.
Boy, he had bad luck to have the same name as the perfumed prince general who Bill Clinton used to bomb the hell out of Serbia and Serbia’s Kosovo
in order to deliver Orthodox Christian Serbia’s Kosovo over to the muslim Albanians.
I’m a EE. If I had it to do over again I would major in physics as he did.
That’s who I thought it was at first....
My first real sys admin job was on a DEC PDP 11-84. Used a bank of 9.6 modems to connect terminals across Ft Leavenworth. Tape backups were real to real and the syslog printer was a daisy wheel.
That’s “reel to reel” there buddy; others of us old dawgs know this shit also.
Given that Clark invented LINCtape, which turned into DECtape, maybe taxcontrol meant “real, too real”.
Wesley Clark? Wasn’t he in the Army or something?
Read the article. It addresses that.
Not to be confused with “Weasley Clark”, the Clinton era army general that most officers despise to this day...
RLTW
RIP.
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