Wesley A. Clark
| Wesley A. Clark | |
|---|---|
Wes Clark in 2009
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| Born | Wesley Allison Clark April 10, 1927 New Haven, Connecticut, U.S. |
| Died | February 22, 2016 (aged 88) Brooklyn, New York City, New York |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields |
Computer engineering Internet |
| Institutions |
MIT Lincoln Laboratory Washington University Clark, Rockoff and Associates |
| Alma mater | UC Berkeley |
| Known for | TX-0, TX-2, LINC |
| Notable awards |
Eckert–Mauchly Award Computer Pioneer Award National Academy of Engineering member |
Wesley Allison Clark (April 10, 1927 – February 22, 2016) was an American physicist who is credited for designing the first modern personal computer. He was also a computer designer and the main participant, along with Charles Molnar, in the creation of the LINC computer, which was the first minicomputer and shares with a number of other computers (such as the PDP-1) the claim to be the inspiration for the personal computer.
Clark was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and grew up in Kinderhook, New York, and in northern California. His parents, Wesley Sr. and Eleanor Kittell, moved to California, and he attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he graduated with a degree in physics in 1947. Clark began his career as a physicist at the Hanford Site. In 1981, Clark received the Eckert–Mauchly Award for his work on computer architecture. He was awarded an honorary degree by Washington University in 1984. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1999. Clark is a charter recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award for "First Personal Computer".
Clark moved to the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1952 where he joined the Project Whirlwind staff. There he was involved in the development of the Memory Test Computer (MTC), a testbed for ferrite core memory that was to be used in Whirlwind. His sessions with the MTC, "lasting hours rather than minutes" helped form his views that computers were to be used as tools on demand for those who needed them. That view carried over into his designs for the TX-0 and TX-2 and the LINC. He expresses this view clearly here:
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