Long before John Lilly used Apple IIs to attempt to speak to dolphins, the LINC, the first modern personal computer, was his tool of choice in trying to coax conversation from the marine mammals. That was in the 1960s, the decade in which physicist Wesley A. Clark, realizing that microchips would progressively get much smaller and cheaper, led a team that built the not-quite-yet-portable PC, which ran counter to the popular idea of computers as shared instruments. It retailed at $43,000. 

Clark just died at 88. From John Markoff’s NYT obituary of the scientist: 

He achieved his breakthroughs working with a small group of scientists and engineers at the Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Early on they had the insight that the cost of computing would fall inexorably and lead to computers that were then unimaginable.

Severo Ornstein, who as a young engineer also worked at Lincoln in the 1960s, recalled Mr. Clark as one of the first to have a clear understanding of the consequences of the falling cost and shrinking size of computers.

“Wes saw the future 15 years before anyone else,” he said.

Mr. Clark also had the insight as a young researcher that the giant metal cabinets that held the computers of the late 1950s and early ’60s would one day vanish as microelectronics technologies evolved and circuit sizes shrank.

…

Each LINC had a tiny screen and keyboard and comprised four metal modules. Together they were about as big as two television sets, set side by side and tilted back slightly. The machine, a 12-bit computer, included a one-half megahertz processor. (By contrast, an iPhone 6s is thousands of times faster and has 16 million times as much memory.)

A LINC sold for about $43,000 — a bargain at the time — and Digital Equipment, the first minicomputer company, ultimately built them commercially, producing 50 of the original design.

The influence of the LINC was far-reaching. For example, as a Stanford undergraduate, Larry Tesler, who would go on to become an early advocate of personal computing and who helped design the Lisa and Macintosh at Apple Computer, programmed a LINC in the laboratory of the molecular biologist Joshua Lederberg.•