Mary Allen Wilkes | |
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| Born | September 25, 1937 (age 86) Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Wellesley College, Harvard Law School |
| Known for | Work with LINC computer |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer programming, logic design, law |
| Institutions | MIT, Washington University in St. Louis |
Mary Allen Wilkes (born September 25, 1937) is a lawyer, former computer programmer and logic designer, known for her work with the LINC computer, now recognized by many as the world's first "personal computer". [1]
Wilkes was born in Chicago, Illinois and graduated from Wellesley College in 1959 where she majored in philosophy and theology. [2] Wilkes planned to become a lawyer, but was discouraged by friends and mentors from pursuing law because of the challenges women faced in the field. [3] A geography teacher in the eighth grade had told Wilkes, "Mary Allen, when you grow up, you ought to be a computer programmer." [4] She worked in the field as one of the first programmers for a number of years before pursuing law and becoming an attorney in 1975. [5]
Wilkes worked under Oliver Selfridge and Benjamin Gold on the Speech Recognition Project at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts from 1959 to 1960, programming the IBM 704 and the IBM 709. [6] She joined the Digital Computer Group, also at Lincoln Laboratory, just as work was beginning on the LINC design under Wesley A. Clark in June 1961. Clark had earlier designed Lincoln's TX-0 and TX-2 computers. Wilkes's contributions to the LINC development included simulating the operation of the LINC during its design phase on the TX-2, [6] designing the console for the prototype LINC and writing the operator's manual for the final console design. [7]
In January, 1963, the LINC group left Lincoln Laboratory to form the Center for Computer Technology in the Biomedical Sciences at MIT's Cambridge, Massachusetts campus, where, in the summer of 1963 it trained the first participants in the LINC Evaluation Program, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. [8] Wilkes taught participants in the program and wrote the early LINC Assembly Programs (LAP) for the 1024-word LINC. She also co-authored the LINC's programming manual, Programming the LINC with Wesley A. Clark. [9]
In the summer of 1964 a core group from the LINC development team left MIT to form the Computer Systems Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis. [10] Wilkes, who had spent 1964 traveling around the world, rejoined the group in late 1964, but lived and worked from her parents' home in Baltimore until late 1965. She worked there on a LINC provided by the Computer Systems Laboratory and is usually considered to be the first user of a personal computer in the home. [11] [12]
By 1965, the LINC team had doubled the size of the LINC memory to 2048 12-bit words, which enabled Wilkes to develop the more sophisticated operating system, LAP6. LAP6 incorporated a scroll editing technique which made use of an algorithm proposed by her colleagues, Mishell J. Stucki and Severo M. Ornstein. [13] LAP6, which has been described as "outstandingly well human engineered", [14] provided the user the ability to prepare, edit, and manipulate documents (usually LINC programs) interactively in real time, using the LINC's keyboard and display, much like later personal computers. The LINC tapes performed the function of the scroll, and also provided interactive filing capabilities for documents and programs. Program documents could be converted to binary and run. Users could integrate their own programs with LAP6 using a link provided by the system, and swap the small LINC tapes around to share programs, an early "open source" capability. Some of this work took place on a LINC machine installed in her parents' house in Baltimore. In interview she was asked if this made her the first person to use a computer in a private residence, she replied "Well, I guess I might have been...". [15]
The Computer Systems Laboratory's next project, also headed by Clark, was the design of "Macromodules", computer building blocks. [16] Wilkes designed the multiply macromodule, the most complex of the set.
Wilkes left the computer field in 1972 to attend the Harvard Law School. She practiced as a trial lawyer for many years, both in private practice and as head of the Economic Crime and Consumer Protection Division of the Middlesex County District Attorney's Office in Massachusetts. She taught in the Trial Advocacy Program at the Harvard Law School from 1983 to 2011, and sat as a judge for the school's first- and second-year Ames (moot court) competition for 18 years. In 2001 she became an arbitrator for the American Arbitration Association, sitting primarily on cases involving computer science and information technology. From 2005 through 2012, she served as a judge of the Annual Willem C. VIS International Commercial Arbitration Moot competition in Vienna, Austria, organized by Pace University Law School.
She is noted in the field of computer science for:
Her work has been recognized in Great Britain's National Museum of Computing's 2013 [17] exhibition "Heroines of Computing" at Bletchley Park, [18] and by the Heinz Nixdorf Museums Forum in Paderborn, Germany, in its 2015-16 exhibition, Am Anfang war Ada: Frauen in der Computergeschichte (In the beginning was Ada: Women in Computer History). [19]
The LEO was a series of early computer systems created by J. Lyons and Co. The first in the series, the LEO I, was the first computer used for commercial business applications.
The LINC is a 12-bit, 2048-word transistorized computer. The LINC is considered by some to be the first minicomputer and a forerunner to the personal computer. Originally named the Linc, suggesting the project's origins at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, it was renamed LINC after the project moved from the Lincoln Laboratory. The LINC was designed by Wesley A. Clark and Charles Molnar.
The TX-0, for Transistorized Experimental computer zero, but affectionately referred to as tixo, was an early fully transistorized computer and contained a then-huge 64K of 18-bit words of magnetic-core memory. Construction of the TX-0 began in 1955 and ended in 1956. It was used continually through the 1960s at MIT. The TX-0 incorporated around 3,600 Philco high-frequency surface-barrier transistors, the first transistor suitable for high-speed computers. The TX-0 and its direct descendant, the original PDP-1, were platforms for pioneering computer research and the development of what would later be called computer "hacker" culture. For MIT, this was the first computer to provide a system console which allowed for direct interaction, as opposed to previous computers, which required the use of punched card as a primary interface for programmers debugging their programs. Members of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club, "the very first hackers at MIT", reveled in the interactivity afforded by the console, and were recruited by Marvin Minsky to work on this and other systems used by Minsky's AI group.
The MIT Lincoln Laboratory TX-2 computer was the successor to the Lincoln TX-0 and was known for its role in advancing both artificial intelligence and human–computer interaction. Wesley A. Clark was the chief architect of the TX-2.
Raytheon BBN is an American research and development company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.
Allen Newell was an American researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department of Psychology. He contributed to the Information Processing Language (1956) and two of the earliest AI programs, the Logic Theorist (1956) and the General Problem Solver (1957). He was awarded the ACM's A.M. Turing Award along with Herbert A. Simon in 1975 for their contributions to artificial intelligence and the psychology of human cognition.
Sir Maurice Vincent Wilkes was an English computer scientist who designed and helped build the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), one of the earliest stored program computers, and who invented microprogramming, a method for using stored-program logic to operate the control unit of a central processing unit's circuits. At the time of his death, Wilkes was an Emeritus Professor at the University of Cambridge.
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) was a global organization promoting the responsible use of computer technology. CPSR was incorporated in 1983 following discussions and organizing that began in 1981. It educated policymakers and the public on a wide range of issues. CPSR incubated numerous projects such as Privaterra, the Public Sphere Project, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the 21st Century Project, the Civil Society Project, and the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference. Founded by U.S. computer scientists at Stanford University and Xerox PARC, CPSR had members in over 30 countries on six continents. CPSR was a non-profit 501.c.3 organization registered in California.
DECtape, originally called Microtape, is a magnetic tape data storage medium used with many Digital Equipment Corporation computers, including the PDP-6, PDP-8, LINC-8, PDP-9, PDP-10, PDP-11, PDP-12, and the PDP-15. On DEC's 32-bit systems, VAX/VMS support for it was implemented but did not become an official part of the product lineup.
Severo M. Ornstein is an American retired computer scientist and the son of composer Leo Ornstein. In 1955 he joined MIT's Lincoln Laboratory as a programmer and designer for the SAGE air-defense system. He later joined the TX-2 group and became a member of the team that designed the LINC. He moved with the team to Washington University in St. Louis where he was one of the principal designers of macromodules.
Wesley Allison Clark 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 the claim to be the inspiration for the personal computer.
Charles Edwin Molnar (1935–1996) was a co-developer of one of the first minicomputers, the LINC, while a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1962. His collaborator was Wesley A. Clark.
The PDP-5 was Digital Equipment Corporation's first 12-bit computer, introduced in 1963.
The Interface Message Processor (IMP) was the packet switching node used to interconnect participant networks to the ARPANET from the late 1960s to 1989. It was the first generation of gateways, which are known today as routers. An IMP was a ruggedized Honeywell DDP-516 minicomputer with special-purpose interfaces and software. In later years the IMPs were made from the non-ruggedized Honeywell 316 which could handle two-thirds of the communication traffic at approximately one-half the cost. An IMP requires the connection to a host computer via a special bit-serial interface, defined in BBN Report 1822. The IMP software and the ARPA network communications protocol running on the IMPs was discussed in RFC 1, the first of a series of standardization documents published by what later became the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
Norman Manuel Abramson was an American engineer and computer scientist, most known for developing the ALOHAnet system for wireless computer communication.
The Computer Pioneer Award was established in 1981 by the Board of Governors of the IEEE Computer Society to recognize and honor the vision of those people whose efforts resulted in the creation and continued vitality of the computer industry. The award is presented to outstanding individuals whose main contribution to the concepts and development of the computer field was made at least fifteen years earlier. The recognition is engraved on a silver medal specially struck for the Society.
Alice Jane Brush is an American computer scientist known for her research in human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing and computer supported collaborative work (CSCW). She is particularly known for her research studying and building technology for homes as well as expertise conducting field studies of technology. She is the co-chair of CRA-W from 2014 to 2017.
Jean Bacon is a British emeritus professor of distributed systems at the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, where she co-headed the Opera Research Group from its founding in the 1990s. Previously, she taught at Hatfield Technical College where, in the 1970s, she was involved in the design of one of the earliest computer science degree programs offered in the United Kingdom. Bacon retired from her faculty position at Cambridge in 2010 but has continued to work on Opera projects related to distributed systems and security in cloud computing.
Jerome Rockhold Cox Jr. was an American computer pioneer, scientist, and entrepreneur. Cox contributed significantly to the areas of biomedical computing, multimedia communications, and computer networking. Cox was the founding chairman of the Department of Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis and senior professor emeritus of Computer Science at Washington University (1999-2023), as well as Founder and President of Blendics, Inc., and Q-Net Security Inc.. In 1998, Cox collaborated with colleagues Jonathan S. Turner and Guru Parulkar in founding Growth Networks.
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