LINC

The LINC (Laboratory Instrument Computer) was a 12-bit, 2048-word computer. The LINC and the PDP-8 can be considered the first mini computers and perhaps the first personal computers as well. Although its instruction set was small, it was larger than the ingenious and tiny PDP-8 instruction set.

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Unlike today's personal computers, the LINC sold for about $50,000. It interfaced well with laboratory experiments. Analog inputs and outputs were part of the basic design. It was designed in 1962 by Charles Molnar and Wesley Clark at Lincoln Laboratory, Massachusetts (Part of MIT), for NIH researchers. The LINC's design was literally in the public domain, perhaps making it unique in the history of computers. 24 LINC computers were assembled in a summer workshop at MIT. Digital Equipment Corporation (starting in 1964) and Spear Inc. of Waltham, MA manufactured them commercially.

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Computer: A computer is a device or for processing information from data according to a program — a compiled list of instructions. The information to be processed may represent numbers, text, pictures, or sound, amongst many other types....

PDP-8: The PDP-8 was the first successful commercial minicomputer, produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the 1960s. It was the first widely-sold computer in the DEC PDP series of computers (the PDP-5 was not originally intended to be a general-purpose computer)....

Mini computer: Introduction...