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Wesley A. Clark is a computer scientist who was one of the main participants in the creation of the LINC laboratory computer, which was the first mini-computer and shares with a number of other computers (such as the PDP-1) the claim to be the inspiration for the personal computer. He received an electrical engineering degree from MIT in 1955. The New York Times series on the history of the personal computer had this to say in an article on August 19, 2001 "How the Computer Became Personal": "In the pantheon of personal computing, the LINC, in a sense, came first—more than a decade before Ed Roberts made PC's affordable for ordinary people. Work started on the Linc, the brainchild of the M.I.T. physicist Wesley A. Clark, in May 1961, and the machine was used for the first time at the National Institutes of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., the next year to analyze a cat's neural responses. Each Linc had a tiny screen and keyboard and comprised four metal modules, which together 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. (The 1.8 gigahertz Intel Pentium 4 chips today are more than 3,600 times as fast.) Lincs sold for about $43,000—a bargain at the time—and were ultimately made commercially by Digital Equipment, the first minicomputer company. Fifty Lincs of the original design were built." He also had a small but key role in the planning for the ARPANET (the predecessor to the Internet), having been the person to suggest the use of separate small computers (later named Interface Message Processors). When Al Rodbell, who lived across the hall from Clark for a decade, found out who his self effacing neighbor was, he shook his head and said, "If only I had known, I would have treated him with a lot more respect; and asked him for a lot more help with my computer."
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