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WES CLARK LECTURE
NOVEMBER 18. 1981


Dick Clayton

There are a couple of people I'd like to mention that are here tonight also and it is with great trepidation that I mention some names because I'm bound to miss a few others. Wes will talk about the significance of the people along the way. We have Charlie Molnar who is the engineering designers side kick of Wes and of most of this biomedical computing and a lot of it all the way through. It was giving us a lot to worry about in engineering design along the way and Charlie is really superb. Mary Allen Wilkes Clark, the programmer that lead to much of the base operating software for the LINC and its various versions. Mort Ruderman, he was the salesman that sold Wes the modules. Some other names out of the past there are Norm Kinch who made it all happen and Lion Malpass. Having blown all the rest of the other names there, let me introduce Wes to give the speech. He is clearly one of my very early educators on computer architecture and a very tough task. master around computer design and he is also the youngest of the computer pioneers to come give our lectures.

Wes Clark

Thank you, Dick. It is a great pleasure as you can tell by the smile on my face to be here tonight and talk with you. I have to say that I never thought of the TX-2 as exactly a simple straight-forward designs but I'll take it in the spirit as it is offered. I have to admit that I put Dick up to mentioning the Eckert-Mauchly Award because at that presentation I made the comment that up until that point after having maintained a couple of decades of verve low profile professional activity my only prior distinction had been the only person that had been fired by MIT three times for insubordination. It wasn't much of a ceremony actually. Not very festive but there is a slide that Doug Clark. took. of the occasion.

I did, however, in looking through records to find material to show you tonight to keep your interest; came across this lovely thing which I told Owen about earlier, this is a brochure published in 1966 by the Honeywell Core. The Honeywell Core. commissioned a British cartoonist names Robert Emmet who was published extensively in Punch magazine over the previous decade or twos maybe still at work I don't know. They commissioned him to design a rather festive computers which he did and you can't see its but you're certainly welcome to come and see it afterwards and I do think. the Museum should acquire it. It is called the Honeywell Emmet Forget-Me-Not Computer. It is actually a charming thing. Let me .lust read about it very briefly.

The Forget-Me-Not Computer comes in three parts, like Henry VI. Built in strict accordance with Livingston's laws 'Memory may hold the door but elephants never forget", it is a pleasing outward appearance being delicately constructed of bamboo so that it maw be placed in any executive suite without offense. It contains a dazzling array of features. Some well--tried, some absolutely new, and some on the fringe of the future. The machine is designed in the shape of art airy elephant. A very open work. thing, full of gadgets, reminiscent of Rube Goldberg. Let me summarize some of these things. Mass memory - it is characterized by heavy watery he thought that would be sufficiently massive. Also it had a drain, called the brain drain, which facilitated the flushing of any wrong numbers and unworthy thoughts. The speed was measured in Billy cycles that being the length of time it took a little man on a bicycle called Billy to get from one end of the frame to the other. Floating Point unit with electro magnets going to and fro on the water. Memory lane considered by most to be the moving fitment in the entire computer. Memory lane offers specially treasured pieces personal memorabilia including the ancestral home where Honeywell started in 1885r mothers a sweet old thermiotic valve, first love where positive meets negative, etc. He goes on to saw that all the preceding features incorporate the latest solid state design. In the Forget-Me-Not computer solid state takes the form of half a brick from a Scottish stately home. Nothing could be more solid or state than that.

The LINC story the LINC apparatus, the LINC history predates the Honeywell Emmet Forget-Me-Not computer. You'll see that it is not made of bamboo, it maw look equally fragile, and in fact parts of it are made of wood. The console boxes are plywood. Very effective stuff. Well for many of you that is gains to be new and what I talk about tonight and show you will be new and for many others it will be very much a trip down memory lane and I hope that you will appreciate it.

The story actually starts in the mid-50s when we were at work on the TX-0 and TX-2. The croup later under Bill Papian was one in which Ken Olsen and I and many others whose names you will know. Dick Bests Tom Stockebrand, Ben Gurley, Ed Hartwell, and some others worked in the development of computer technology at Lincoln Laboratory. We had through one of our staff members, Belmont Farleigh who sot in touch with Walter Rosenblith's laboratory for communications of biophysics at MIT. Out of which came two other very important members of the croup; Charles Molnar being the principal. In the course of interaction with the croup we became rather well versed in some of the difficulties in using the computer in bio-medical research. Well not bio-medical specifically neurophysiological particular kind. We came into contact with the principle funding agency of the government during that period which was the National Institute of Health. Primarily through contact with Bill Papian, the croup leader with one Dr. Bruce Waxman of the Division of Research and Facilities and Resources of NIH.

In any case there was a great deal of interaction and we tried various novel processes - learning from the computer side how difficult it was to instrument really serious working in laboratories of that kind. This are rich in data and very poor in theoretical structure and mathematical structure or at least they were 20 years ago. Ken and I were both lecturers in electrical engineering in that period and I recall one committee established in the engineering department to look over the question of how to further engineering education in computers at MIT. In the course of that study (it became clear to both Ken and me that what that department needed, what MIT needed at that time was a computer that you could get your hands on. That was one thing that they did not have. They had a 701 and a 709 doing at that time or more than one perhaps. When we brought that report back to Rill Papian he immediately suggested that MIT ought to have the TX--O.)

I didn't think too much of that idea at the time because that was a toy of mine. I was busy using it as was Bill Mont, but Bill pointed out rightly that we would be switching our interests more and more to the TX-2 which was then in a building in the late 50s. So in 1958 it did indeed transfer down to MIT. I had of course expected it to do to Walter Rosenblith's laboratory. He had been the principle user of that instrument at the time. His group of people had been among the principle users at Lincoln Laboratory as far as MIT was concerned. So it was suite a surprise to me that Walter declined, backed away at a very high speed as a matter of fact. It was too much for him to handle. He thought it would be too disruptive to the normal workings and traditions of that laboratory which was a small and very talented group of people with many visitors from all over the worlds and a laboratory of many important methodologies were developed over the years. As we know Walter became and went on to become the Provost of MIT. Well that was his prize.

It certainly had me thinking what was wrong with the TX-0. Although in the form that it was sent to MIT it was enriched considerably in order code, but reduced in memory size. In May of 1961, couple wears later Walter led a group of us to California to UCLA where we helped to dedicate the Brain Research Institute at the Medical School there. In my contribution to that I talked about digital techniques and their data processing. I had by the way sort of as a substitute for the TX-0 some kind on instrument that I thought the Communications Bio-Physics Laboratory at MIT could use well had put together a logically small gadget called the 'ARC'. The Average Response Computer to which Dick Clayton referred to. Small it wasn't. It was the size of an ark. It was the size of a refrigerator on its side, and on huge casters. It is the sort of thing that You would put into a box of this size or perhaps a scope probe these days. That instrument was used for many years in the quantification of neuro-electric signals arid much useful research was done using that tool.

So at the Brain Research Institute by describing the arc in contrasting the TX-O, I said to them the TX-0 was a relatively small but powerful stored program computer and a rough comparison to the TX-0 computers is illuminating. Both machines operate on an 18 bit binary numbers, controlled analog to digital converters, have cathode-raw tube displays, can be controlled by the experimenters and hold about the same number of circuits derived from the same body of electronic technology.

The TX-0 however, has about 8000 registers of digital storage and is organized as a general purpose device. It is quite simple to program the TX-0 to act very much like the ARC, in fact this has been done requiring an investment of effort in measurement of only hours. Quite a familiar story to us, but to the brain researchers over the periods certainly not. It can more over generate quite various displays of data and results of analysis and can be programmed to carry out exceedingly lengthy and complex operations if desired. This flexibility and behavior is characteristic of the story of the stored program computer and obviously a treat value. So at the end of this I said, that the stored program computers like the TX-0 are beginning to appear in commerical form. I had in mind I guess the PDP-1,

There was reason to hope that these machines were perhaps other general purpose machines with the capability somewhere between the ARC and the TX--0 will find their way into a laboratory. The most significant benefit promised by such development is the greatly expanded and freedom of choice of the various methods of analysis that would be made possible by the use of these tools of research. That wasn't especially present of me, but I had already been thinking about the laboratory instrument computer. Then in deeds not by that name as it happens. Then as I got back to Boston, I think. on Mother's Day of 1961. and I proceeded to work on the design of the thing whatever it was at the time. I took. an informal leave of absence from Lincoln Laboratory.

I don't know how those of you in the digital design business to about your thing, but for me it is a matter of finding some kind of gimmick to start with. It doesn't much matter what it is as long as it sets me started. It survives weeks, months, depends on the size and complexity of the design and also on the soundness of the gimmick. My gimmick here was what you see above a set of registers pretty much identical in form, but identified by function. At the top you see "R" I don't know what that meant. 'F' was some kind of function box in which all the processing would be carried down. 'PQ' and down to 'A' at the bottom that I was distinguishing as an accumulator as though each of those would obviously be able to accumulate was at the end of the chain. I imagine there were eight altogether. Memory is up at the top that was interchanged to 'R'. Magtape which I clearly realized that we needed in some form and in fact thought of a variant of the TX-0 tape system. The busses themselves would have been 3-bit buses. I was familiar with the DEC system modules at the time and there were a number of quad units that made a 12-bit word, that I was convinced about the right size. The CDC 160 was an existing proof that at least one other designer thought that it was practical word length. So three of those quads made a resister and that was a nice working group. So it was a nice idea, transferring around the microprogramming actually the modern idea for 1961.

This is the first picture of the LINC magnetic tape unit. These are scraps from my notebook by the way, As I said I had left Lincoln Laboratory rather informally and had set up at home on the top of a nice pinewooded hill where this stuff is all done in the spring and summer. Ben Gurlew as a matter of fact used to come over at the time and we would talk about the design decisions that had to be made on the PDP-1 which he was working on. It seems that I had two in mind, my notebook which is very scratchy at this time and not very well shown, but there is the tape in the corner. As a matter of fact here is a picture, just a couple weeks later in the end of June, of the second known picture of LINC tape unit. I think I was beginning to get some appreciation of the horror of the control that would be required to carry out the very simple functions that I had in mind.

In any case, I worked on this design continually and began in fact to call it the alpha LINC to live it some distinguishing name and to also give it a hidge<?> variance if that is possible. Put after working with this for another couple of months and trying to reduce it to modules form at the timer I came up with the following horror. The register row is now horizontal instead of vertical and you recognize some things like 'M' for memory which becomes a little more central, the function box, the C resisters. I did a count of the total cost of the thing would have been disastrous so that was a crisis for me and I immediately dropped everything and started a new notebook and started to work very hard on re-design. The architecture that resulted was fairly prosaic and I'm sure you have seen pictures of this architecture in the various pieces of literature that are available on the LINC. Not very compelling, a 12-bit architecture of ordinary sort. (The art of the thing was not in the particular architectures but in the careful crafting of the machine level order codes to make possible very small instruction sets for very small program instruction sets for very simple processes.)

For example the control of the tape unit is built into the machine and under the control of single construction. ???instruction??? It was not a very compelling architecture. but (the entire concept of putting this in one box that an experimenter could take away to his laboratory and work with in a personal way was in fact the essence of the thing.)

When this design was pretty close to ready I came back to Lincoln and found a crew of people very anxious to look at it and many of whom subsequently worked on the further design and building of what we had begun to call the prototypes but later had to call the demonstration prototype to distinguish it from something that we did later. It is about this point that you begin to recognize some pf the hardware (Charlie is on right, the hardware is on the left). That is pieces only of the demonstration prototype that you would recognize. Perhaps a console piece and a separable keyboard down there. With this degree I am not sure exactly what you can see.

This is a staff of consoles being operated by William Simon who came to our laboratory as a trained physicist, a very brilliant guy, in fact a friend of mine once said he was the only person he knew that could give 17 valid reasons why Hudson's Lake should be drained. Quite possibly one of the brightest minds in biomedical engineering working today. He is presently at the University of Rochester. A number of other people, Severil Weinstein<?>, Tom Stockebrand, Merv Allen Wilkes of course we had help from the technical staff and Norm pinch in fact he took track of an incredible number of things that you'll hear about later. Finally we got together a demonstration prototype and tried it. Let me show you first of all the kinds of pictures we were making at that time. This was actually done a couple of months later as you can see. Charlie and I took this almost completed demonstration prototype to Washington in May of 1962 and demonstrated it at a special conference of the National Academy of Sciences. By the was Bill Simon set up an elaborate set of television sets around the auditorium about this size and it was a very effective demonstration. I hadn't known until I stepped up to the podium if anything was going to work. Until 7 minutes before Charlie was crawling around practically in his underwear either pre--loading programs or whatever, had to rush up to the hotel room to change into his uniform. He was a member of the military and felt that he had to make a formal appearance. As I set to the podium Charlie put in front of me a small piece of paper that said 'The following have my confidence and he named three or four demonstration programs that had worked and was absolutely trying every one that worked.

Following the demonstrations of course everything fell apart. Charlie recalls one person came up afterwards very intently studying the machines insulation and we thought that was rather curious but it turned out he was from the Smithsonian. I must tell you from there we took it to the laboratory of Dr. Robert Livingston who was then the Chief of the Neuroscience branch at NIH and I can show you the first serious input device for the LINC. That's Jasper the wonderful laboratory animal with implanted electrons that was hooked up to the LINC and from whose auditory implanted electro signals we extracted responses to auditory stimuli<?> from the <?> microphonics. Charlie could fill you in with more details with that later, if you had any questions.

In any case an open house was held and people from all over NIH and various labs including the computation centers came to look at what was going on. We remember (one fellow looked at the LINC inside and out, and at this wire going over to the other side and said 'This thing possible can't work, there is no way to get the data in'. He couldn't find any punched cards. We took the things back to Lincoln Laboratory exhausted, but triumphant and wanted to do more.) Obviously we were just on the beginning edge of this and we hadn't even finished the machine vet. The machine was subsequently finished and put into use by Dr. Tom Sandler another member of the computing communications bio-physics laboratory under Walter Rosenblith who had come to Lincoln and was most anxious as were we to establish a so called 'wet' facility. That is an animal source facility for study of neuraural event of behavioral processes. In which we would have used the TX-2 to be proposed building a large wet laboratory. People in those days distinguished wet from dry physiologists. The dry ones were the theoreticians Lincoln Laboratory did not like the idea. Lincoln Labs told us we couldn't continue that work in Lincoln and that if we couldn't find a way to embed our work in some of the ongoing work of some of the defense programs we would be better of finding other auspices. So in fact we went on the road for quite a while trying to find other auspices. A number of very dedicated people that worked very hard on the LINC program were elected to go along and the only question, was where. It was finally in the Fall of that year (1962) that Walter Rosenblith, that you see here on the right talking to the present head of the communications bio-physics laboratory, Dr. Louis Braida, suggested that in fact there was a bigger thing that could be put together, something that would encompass a great deal of computer research and a great deal of bio-medical research under one roof. He proposed that it be done with a very large sum of money that NIH sponsor that and MIT would act as a host institutions but that any institution within hundreds of miles of MIT and Harvard with the exception of Yale of course would be participants.

It was clear that we had to do a re-design for production and get some of these things into the use by experimenters as far ranging in discipline and geography as possible so as to spread the word. What was defined was an evaluation program as a marvelous mechanism. It needed the money and it needed some organizational talent. The money was in fact put in by NIB. This is Dr. Bruce Waxman on the right and he is talking to Dr. Lou McCowski. Bruce Waxman, a marvelous civil servant and the most imaginative display managed to do such things as drop $25 in a poker game to a colleague in another part of NIH because he ran out money and he needed more funds from this other group. He managed to secure some additional funds from NASA and altogether about one million dollars would be spent on the LINC evaluation program to complete the design of the machine and set it out into use.

In parallel with this development of the LINC it was going on a further establishment of what was then called the center for computer research in the bio-medical sciences that Walter Rosenblith was organizing with Bill Papian. In fact that was funded in a dazzling display of speed and efficiency by NIB. The funded almost $30M on a seven year grant. It was the biggest thing that NIH had ever done and it made the front page of the Times.

What was an evaluation program? What we had in mind was to put together kits because we couldn't complete the machines in time and furthermore we began to realize that there was some specific value in having your hands on the fundamental apparatus right from the scratch. Charlie will claim that it was my idea, but I claim that it was Charlie's that we invite a dozen or so research scientists in the bio-medical sciences to Cambridge to teach them everything there is to know about computers according to our lights, give them this kit and watch them put it together, and award it to them as a door prize when then left. This idea is quite a current one actually as you know in the microprocessor same. But on this scale it is a bit frightening.

The kit you can see up there has wired frame with a power supply on the right, a stack of system modules. By the was not all of those are system modules about 10% of the circuits were designed by Charlie. They were better than DEC's at the time by considerable degree, but also we were concerned about giving DEC everything there was to give or to have about this project. We wanted to keep this a more open affair. So DEC only got 90% of the electronics. You can see the tape unit those pairs of eyes, under it the scope, the console on the right, a stack of documents, and a terminal box sort of plug-ins in which arbitrary apparatus could be put to couple the machine to laboratory environment. You can't see because they are black to the table at the lefty but there is a very big heavy coil of cables that connect the electronics frame to the finished product. You will see that when you see the LINC in the other building later. But that is what we had in mind. They would come and learn about that thing. Indeed Tom Sandle had agreed to act as the chairman of the LINC evaluation committee which was formed, a formally constituted six member group of very distinguished scientists who would review about 72 proposals that were made by people in response to an invitation published in Science and most of the university departments around the country. Then then would pick from them about 12 who would come to Cambridge in two waves of 6 each for one month of intensive training in the Summer of 1963.

This will begin to sound very familiar to some of you here. I was doing to read these names overt but I've chanted my mind. The areas of interest of the people who were chosen for the program included: membrane biophysics, cardiovascular physiology, neurophysiology, psychology, pharmacology, animal communications, exobiology and biological control theory. Quite a range of things to try.

We hadn't finished designing the thing yet, this was early 1963 and we had just committed to having visitors in to put kits together in the summer. There was a bit of pressure. That is a long table with everything and Charlie was hard at work debugging the frame in the back. We had a very intensive period trains to figure out how to make the machine work in its redesign form. He is Severil Weinstein<?> on the left trying to explain a point to Professor Jerry Cox who came to visit from St. Louis at an urgent request for help at one critical point to help us understand the memory a little bit better. Jerry Cox was a member of the evaluation committee as a matter of fact in addition. You will see a very familiar face here, this was taken from a somewhat later period which would fit right into the Summer of '63. Mort Ruderman on the left with the back side of the LINC pieces I think it is the control console and of Severil<?> and Michele Stucchi who came from the team at Walter's laboratory that worked some at Lincoln. Well so the debugging was going on and the planning was going on. Mary Allen was undertaking the redesign of the LINC assembly program and also the one who took the layout of the control section and we had to plan for course work to teach these people. The first wave arrived in July on schedule and right away we found ourselves two weeks behind. The frames were out still being wired and checked and so it was very edgy.

We taught them and here you see Severil<?:> with a bunch of the participants. Mary Allen explaining some points of the programming and logic. The caption on the posted picture which was taken by Bill Simon was 'and now children the Momma bear said to the Papa bear...'. Irving Toma, then a graduate student in physics came to us, I guess he bounced off the communications physics laboratory some how and got involved. We had to teach these people everything as you can see down to the real fundamentals and the real nitty gritty. But finally the frames did arrive in good shape and you see here Dr. Keith Killman and Jim Hance from Stanford University from the department of pharmacology looking at the frame, and Jay Walter Woodbury from the University of Washington in Seattle. (Ken Olsen used to say in the days that we built them 8 and 10 feet high that it wasn't a computer if you could see over the top of it.) Jay Walter was very tall and perhaps it is more than symbolic that he had some of the best success with the LINC of any of them. On the other hand John Lilly who was interested in using the machine to communicate with dolphins in a very wet laboratory in Florida probably found the computer more like the W. Gray Walter model. He would say that the computer was nothing more than a status symbol with a conveniently flat top.

It of course wasn't all just computers. Henry Littleboy and Dr. Bernie Weiss, one of our visitors from the Johns Hopkins, planed during lunch hour and of course during all this time we were debugging and figuring out what modes had simultaneous that could be put into each of these six or eight machines. The evaluation program formally funded 16 of them but there was something like 21 of them before we were through. People came in to sort of get in on the act. We had to keep them modified as we discovered in our debugging as we went. We were really making half a dozen or ten simultaneous prototypes. Finally it was time to plug in the DEC plug-in units. the system units which went in sideways into the frame. Here is Dr. Benow<?> Duke University putting in some modules. As you can recall some of those old units had small holes in the bail and a screwdriver had to be inserted from time to time to adjust the pot on some of them. The sense amplifier was one of them that was a nasty one. It was bit of a trick reaching into the frame and turning the screwdriver sideways and getting through into the hole in the bail and finding the slot of the screw and turning that darn thing while it's <?> on the scope. Everyone managed to do that successfully except one chap who was a brain surgeon.

We wired up the cables. This is a picture of Dr. Grodinson <?> Randell stringing together some of those long cables that tied the electronics frame to the rack. Here is a number of assembly console shots of things mounted in racks and so on. That is Norm Hill and Ralph Stacy. Stacy and Waxman have published a four volume series in which this is volume two 'Computers in Bio-Medical Research' in which they have summarized a treat deal of the work over that decade.

Here is a picture of Norm Kinch who is here in the audience as you know. He is stacking up some of those console modules. You can see that there are four of them arranged to be stacked. Those are wood boxes; they are heavier than they ought to have been, but a lot lighter than you need a strong man in order to handle. Norm in fact did everything as Dick said in his introduction. Norm came to us at Lincoln Laboratory when we were starting the TX-2. He immediately took charge of all there was to do and I must tell you that the way to make sure of the success of a project, if at all possible, is to try to find as talented a person who happens also to be an ex-chief petty officer. This guy made everything happen. Norm if you will forgive me; he is the sort of fellow to whom you could say I would like to have a laboratory built on the other side of town and stocked by Thursday afternoon and Norm would say okay boy I'll take care of it. He generally did.

This was a very intensive period and we did set very tired. Some of these pictures speak for themselves. I believe that is 3:30 a +m. Finally the machines were finished and shipped off by a van to their destinations. We had done a neat thing and we deserved a big rest and a big pat on the head. As it happened the center for computer research in the bio-medical sciences fell apart at that very point. In retrospect it was too much too soon for MIT to absorb properly and conditions were laid down and they were simply impossible for us to meet.

Without being too detailed about it or too morbid, in fact what happened was we sent the money back to NIH and once again we are on the road looking for a place to continue the work. NIH was very interested, of course in seeing us continue seeing we had thus caught them at the end of phase one of a two to three phase program. Furthermore, we had other tricks up our sleeves, though we didn't describe them very well. I had in mind the macromodule stuff which we were hoping to build; a new effort but in any case it wasn't possible to do that at MIT so for the next many months we tried to find another place to live.

It isn't so that you can just take an arbitrary computers look into its history and say well somebody decided to do that and sat down and did it and out came a computers nice jobs go on and do something else. In fact you see nothing to have been farther from the truth in the case of the LINC. It had a very stormy history. The LINC group was a very tightly knit and dedicated, talented bunch of people who constituted a kind of an inadjustable lump for MIT. They just weren't able to rationalize our position with respect to the traditional and right correct position for the University to take. It is very hard for research of this kind to be done at the University auspices anyway.

Well, so we moved. We went to St. Louis where this provost Dr. George Pake now vice president of the Xerox Corp. had warmly welcomed us and even guaranteeing to put up the money in transition should we not be able to find enough to sustain the operation during that period until new funds could be secured.

That is a picture of the exterior of the old Shriner's Hospital for crippled children which was partially occupied and partially renovated at the time and in which Jerry Cox had his repertoire with whom we had had many dealings. It needed a little work but we did in fact fix: it up. That is not the only space but that was one very dramatic one. Most of the building did look like that. It had been abandoned for many years and St. Louis is a very muggy climate. Here you see us dressed up and we did install a LINC, that is a very clean installation. Dr. Russ Pfeiffer was from MIT and he built up with Charlie a laboratory for auditory neurophysiology at the Medical School which the Shriner's Hospital was adjacent to.

I guess you can recognize a piece of the LINC in the left corner. The rest of the apparatus relates to the studies in auditory neurophusiology, We got back on our feet, undertook to refine the LINC and Serveril<?>> and Michele in particular were enormously effective in keeping the momentum. Charlie and Mary Allen joined the group somewhat later. From the East, Charlie was finishing his degree at MIT and completing a service to the military. We found ourselves going around to look at the various participants laboratories and the programs to find out how they were doing. Looking into things here and there. You recognize the tape unit again. It is a trademarks isn't it?

Sometimes the console blocks were stacked up in a nice handy form. You see Serveril<?:who be then had grown a beard looking over A1 Banow<?>'s shoulder at the LINC stack. Notice the stack of reels in the back. This is an installation from the Presbyterian Hospital in Philadelphia where again the LINC console array was actually grouped. Our position was that was the computers that part that you see. The box there, not the rest of the apparatus which is part of the adjunct in our laboratory. The electronics frame was just that. It was the end of 30' cables so that you could hide it if you didn't want to look at it in case it was in the way. Conception was okays 30' was a little short. On the other hand 30' of cable is a little heavy. The notion was anyway that was the embarrassing part and you wanted that to collapse and do nothing. But that was the best that we could do.

Some of the laboratories were so crowded that You couldn't even see the LINC in this one. This was in Dr. Lilly's laboratory in Florida. On the left is a plastic screen that protects the LINC from a wonderfully invented animal; a dolphin called 'Elvar'<?> who had a very active squirt. He could shoot a string of salt water onto the electronics from half way across the room. That machine never really did work very well for more than just technical reasons. Sometimes the terminal boxy the fourth module for the console was removed and set in some handy location as You see it here next to a printer. Typically the LINC was mounted in racks with lots of other stuffy taken apart, taken out of its boxes that is the console and tucked in. This is the laboratory in Wisconsin and this is Dr. Jersey<?> Rose a very famous neurophysiologist, hard at work on some analysis. You can hardly make out some pieces of the LINC in this crowded laboratory which I think is from the University of Washington in Seattle.

Pieces of the LINC are embedded in this set-up in the laboratory at Johns Hopkins. The terminal box is in the bottom, and You can see the console just above the shelf and You know that is on a slipping panel and then up at the top are the tape reels and the keyboard on the right and a couple of items up at the scope.

Perhaps the most distinguished event of that period according to the LINC was the final program. In 1962, Just a few months after the people had completed their machines and taken them away we had a gathering in New Hampshire at an old resort and had sort of a report from everybody. Sort of like a six-month check point. Perhaps it was closer to a year, but in any case it was fairly dismal. People got their machines back with them, but then were short of documents and their machines were still in floxies<?> and then were still in 16 prototypes or I guess 12 official prototypes being modified bravely by the folks by themselves. Although we did have to lend a hand from time to time and then hadn't done as much work as we had unrealistically hoed. Charlie and I were rather disappointed by that performances but the following Year in St. Louis we had the final reading of the LINC evaluation program and everyone of the 65 invited participants showed ups all but three within the day before the conference even started. We step up at an auditorium at the Medical School and put a LINC up on the auditorium. You can see me talking on the left with Joe Foley of the Spear Core. which was a group that set itself up to specifically to make LINCs. I don't think then had direct competition in mind with DEC, but then made a fine instrument and one of the first to put up with an integrated circuit version of some speed called the Microlength 300.

I think that company is now subsequently a division of Betkins/Dickinson<?>. So in any case we invited all those people to come that came and you unfortunately can't see Dr. Tom Sandle who was the chairman of the evaluation committee who is off on stage right. There You can see Mary Allen, Dick Clayton, Mort, Win Hindle. Charlie Molnar, and a few others. Most of the time that was spent was kind of a show and tell that brought their programs and some apparatus with them and demonstrated things to the rest of us to show us what then had accomplished in that time.

You can see Severil<?> and Jerry Cox not holding us to the console, but operating the switches for some of the displays that you can't see in the foreground. Mort and Win Hindle talking to Bill Papian. Of course there were side demonstrations as well. I think Dr. Maynard <?> of the St. Louis group demonstrating really great program that showed massive membrane motion. There is a picture of me talking with Dick Clayton and Win, and Mort talking with Professor Harold Shipton whom some of you have seen here at DEC from time to time.
That meeting save rise to this publication that some of you have and Mort and Win must have because they were participants in the conference. This was called the 'Complication on the Mississippi' and again you can see the LINC tape reels I'm sure from the back. of the room. This certain intent to summarize their experience of the preceding year. I'll just read a few things to you.
By-and-large they found things to be terrific. Here's a comment from the Bowman-Gray School of Medicine 'Of the nearly 2000 hours LINC has been operating since fabrication less than four hours has been spent in maintenance and repair. This effort involved placing a transistor in one of the drivers, cleaning the air filter, resoldering two broken wires in the fan tail cables, and adjustment of the space bar and return spring on the keyboard. Not too bad.

From Duke University I'm very fond of this one. 'Astonishment is the only way I can describe me feelings about the performance of the LINC except for a few tape reading difficulties which were adjusted, the machine has given no trouble whatsoever. It has been completely reliable as far I knows, and in 4000 hours it has never made an error which wasn't attributable to something else when we finally understood what the difficulty was. On several occasions we have had the machine running non-stop for as many as three weeks with no sign of trouble. If only the mechanical equipment were as reliable my maintenance troubles would be over.' That is a familiar story. Gus I heard you make that comment in 1952.

Here is one from Stanford. 'The performance of the LINC in respect to maintenance had reasonable expectations. After approximately 3200 hours of operation the only failures have been one bad cable connection and two output transistors whose failure can be traced to external misuse.' from Presbyterian Hospital 'we have been most satisfied with the LINC in our lab. The computer has practically been in daily use and has permitted us to execute a large number of experimental work which would not have been possible otherwise. People had trouble programming and that is no surprise.'

This is from Washington University's department of neurology. 'One of the greatest advantages of LINC is flexibility. Also is related to what has been its greatest disadvantage, the time required for programming. While this has decreased with proficiency the same proficiency has also permitted the construction of more elaborate programs and the time consumed for a program beginning to utilize LINC capabilities has been substantial. Time spent programming of course relates in part to the clarity of the individuals experimental ideas and methods and his ability to translate into program format and no hardware or software seems likely to change this. In net we found LINC to be a remarkable machine and the powerful laboratory tool. It has been reliable and has connected to our laboratory equipment with little difficulty or expense and has produced any analysis. If there is any inadequacy of the software rather than the hardware as our ability to use LINC has increased we have been even more impressed with its flexibility and range of application and this has in turn let us do experiments not possible without its capabilities.'


DCM001.4

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