Memorial Tributes Volume 21 (2017) / Chapter Skim
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WESLEY A. CLARK
WESLEY A. CLARK
Pages 48-55
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Louis Fabian Bachrach
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, widely recognized as the world's first personal computer, the great-granddaddy of all the personal devices in use today. The revolutionary nature of Clark's work is best understood by recalling the computing environment of the 1950s.
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I just didn't know who you were at the time." By the early 1960s Clark recognized that hardware size and costs were about to shrink dramatically, further facilitating individual ownership. He foresaw, at least a decade before anyone else, that computers would become personal devices with which one would interact through graphical means.
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Faculty at the University of Wisconsin, where one of the LINCs was placed, said in 2003, "Not only did it speed up data analysis by more than two orders of magnitude, but it also provided rapid, ‘on-line' feedback of processed output that enabled hitherto impossible experiments to be carried out." The recipient of that LINC, neurophysiologist Joe Hind, went on to establish in 1965 a Laboratory Computer Facility at the university, making laboratory computers available to all in
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From page 52... ...
Although he had obtained a $30 million commitment from NIH, the largest grant it had ever awarded, to establish an interuniversity Center for Computer Research in the Biomedical Sciences, he and MIT disagreed over how the center was to be run and in 1964 Clark declined the grant and left MIT. He would often say in later years that he had had the distinction of being the only person in the world to have been fired from MIT for insubordination three times.
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In 1972 he was one of six computer scientists invited to visit and lecture in China for 18 days as guests of the Chinese government. They were the first American scientists to visit China in nearly 20 years.
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He attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a degree in physics in 1947 and pursued graduate studies, which included two years with the Nuclear Reactor Dynamics Group at Hanford, Washington. In his spare time he taught himself Chinese, built a working Turing machine (which he dubbed "The Only Working Turing Machine There Ever Was, Probably," or "TOWTMTEWP")
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