Wesley A. Clark

Who is Wesley A. Clark?

Wesley Allison Clark is a computer scientist and one of the main participants, along with Charles Molnar, in the creation of the LINC laboratory computer, which was the first mini-computer and shares with a number of other computers the claim to be the inspiration for the personal computer.

Clark was born in New Haven, Connecticut and grew up in northern California. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1947, and received an electrical engineering degree from MIT in 1955. Clark worked for Washington University from 1964–72, and as a consultant thereafter. He founded Clark, Rockoff, and Associates in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Maxine L. Rockoff. His oldest son, Douglas, is a professor of computer science at Princeton University.

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 Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, MD, the next year to analyze a cat's neural responses.