LINC

Wesley Clark and Charles Molnar, then at Lincoln Labs, built the LINC, or Laboratory INstrumentation Computer, as a personal laboratory computer, finishing the first in March 1962. The machine was developed in response to the needs of Mary Brazier, a neurophysiologist at MIT who needed better laboratory tools, and it was a followup to the Average Response Computer, an 18 bit special purpose machine built in 1958 for the same purpose. When Lincoln Labs decided that the LINC did not fit their mission, in January 1963, the project moved to MIT, and then in 1964, to Washington University in St Louis. The National Institute of Health funded the project as an experiment to see if coumputers would be a productive tool in the life sciences. By the end of 1963, 20 LINCs had been built and debugged, many by their eventual users.

Alltogether over 24 LINC systems were built by and for customers before late 1964 when DEC began selling a commercial version. By the time DEC introduced the LINC-8, 43 LINC systems had been installed (see Computers and Automation, Mar. 1966, page 34). In total, 50 LINC systems were built, 21 by DEC, 29 by customers.

The self-build LINC kind of was the first open HW ever. The commercial LINC system manufactured by DEC included a sophisticated tape software system and a powerful CRT-based console. Priced at $43,000, the LINC-8 was the first practical, somehow reasonably priced and somehow personal computer on the market.

http://history.nih.gov/exhibits/linc/2.html http://www.faqs.org/faqs/dec-faq/pdp8/section-7.html http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/vs-dec-linc-8.html