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After the first operational LINCs were delivered in 1963, the demand
created by their success stimulated private industry to step in. A small
company called Computer Operations took the LINC tape design and adapted
it to other machines. Spear Corporation produced LINC machines first with
the earlier design, then using microcircuitry instead of the older circuits
used in the original LINC. Dick Clayton of DEC (who once worked in MIT's
Communications Biophysics Group), with help from Clark, adapted the PDP-8
into a two-processor machine called LINC-8, that could accept either LINC
or PDP-8 software. Clayton later modified LINC-8 into a single processor
- the PDP-12, which DEC marketed successfully. Later, according to Clayton,
now vice president of advanced manufacturing technology at DEC, they backed
off from the original concept of LINC as an integrated lab machine in
favor of larger market computers such as the PDP-11.
While the biomedical computing evolution was beginning, in Maynard, a
western suburb of Boston, DEC was struggling to break out of a pack of
competitors for the commercial and industrial market crumbs left by IBM.
Kenneth Olsen, president of DEC, had a hole card which proved devastating
to the competition: his background at Lincoln Lab. He not only knew the
circuits that he helped design, but he and his designers at DEC also had
access to computer ideas and the people who worked at Lincoln Lab.
Gordon Bell, DEC vice president of engineering wrote in 1978, that DEC's
first product lines, the DEC System Modules, were "directly patterned
after the circuits of the TX-0 and the TX-2." Two years after DEC
was formed, Olsen decided to build and sell complete computers. He reached
into Lincoln Lab to hire an engineer, Ben Gurley, who subsequently designed
the PDP-1, DEC's first computer. Gurley borrowed liberally from TX-0 ideas
to produce the PDP-1. After the modest commercial success of the PDP-1,
DEC began to think small -- and cheap. Two years later, Gordon Bell designed
the PDP-4 and PDP-5, the beginning of a trend at DEC toward small computers.
Bell acknowledged that "the LINC was one of the machines that had
a great influence on (his) design." Earlier, Clark and Molnar, while
walking in Harvard Square discussing ways to reduce the costs, had fixed
on a 12-bit word for the LINC, in contrast to the larger word sizes of
the day. The first widely commercially successful minicomputer, DEC's
PDP-8, would mimic their choice. In tracing the origins of the PDP-8,
a machine which, in essence, launched the minicomputer age, Bell begins
with a discussion of LINC as "the first complete personal computer
available to a user ... at a reasonable price." The LINC tape, CRT
console, logic, and software clearly pointed the way for the evolution
of the DEC machine.
Digital Equipment Corporation is now the second largest computer manufacturer
in the U.S. Its early history makes clear that DEC's success relied largely
on the machine designed for biomedical applications -- LINC. It may be
impossible to track in any direct way the LINC of 1963 to the IBM PC or
the Timex-Sinclair machine advertised in today's newspaper for $39.95.
However, without LINC, the advent of minicomputers would certainly have
been delayed. And every subsequent personal computer in the classroom,
the home, and the business office, can trace its lineage back to LINC.
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