
Wesley A. Clark, legendary computer engineer, dies at 88 - ohjeez
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/wesley-a-clark-legendary-computer-engineer-dies-at-88/
======
Adrock
Here's my Wes Clark story...

About 6 years ago I went to his Brooklyn apartment for his birthday. I had
never heard of him, but he's distant cousins with my wife's step father and we
lived nearby. We get to his apartment and I start looking at the book
collection... a lot of interesting math and computer science.

I started talking with him 1 on 1 and at some point he drops that he created
the first personal computer. I'm ashamed to admit it, but in the back of my
mind I was thinking "oh boy, this guy's not all there." But then he took me to
his office and there's a poster of him with the LINC and I'm realizing that
I've hit the motherlode of awesome computing history from a primary source.

He then showed me his current project: a working model Broadway stage for his
granddaughter. It had to-scale working versions of everything, including the
lights and actual mechanisms for drawing the curtains. Then he fired up his
Mac with a 30" monitor and showed me that every piece had been laser cut from
schematics that he had designed. In raw postscript. The entire thing was
programmatically generated from a massive postscript program that was fully
parameterized so he could change the dimensions of anything single component
and the whole stage would be regenerated.

That programmatic modeling project was a big motivation for the work I've been
doing to make parameterized 3d models for ergonomic keyboards
([https://github.com/adereth/dactyl-
keyboard](https://github.com/adereth/dactyl-keyboard)).

I definitely experienced some cognitive dissonance watching an 82 year old
flying around vim editing postscript. It was a trip and it was really
inspiring to see someone his age still hacking.

~~~
keithpeter
Nice memory ,vivily told, thanks.

 _" I definitely experienced some cognitive dissonance watching an 82 year old
flying around vim editing postscript."_

Vi has been around for 30 odd years, and postscript since 1982. Each decade
will bring a new crop of octogenarian vimers! At least until we get direct
brain implant interfaces.

------
dbfclark
I'm his grandson, not his colleague, so far be it from me to say he was a
great man, but he was a great grandfather and an inspiration. He taught me an
enormous amount, from logic to just how hard it can be to get people to adopt
new technologies -- he eschewed word processing, writing every document
directly in PostScript even up to the present -- but most importantly he
showed me how important it is to love what you do, and for that I owe him a
ton of my happiness and career.

Fare you the hell well, Gramps.

~~~
bliti
Sorry for your loss. Could you share some stories about him?

~~~
dbfclark
Everyone has stories, most better than me. I find my most vivid memory of
experiencing him as an adult was that every time you spoke with him he'd have
had some completely flabbergasting new life experience you'd never imagined.
He was a guest on something like the second trip to China after Nixon, took
seminars with Oppenheimer at Berkeley (he tended to call him Oppy), and may
have been invited to help create an early ATM. The list goes on and on.

One Christmas, we were talking about how difficult it is to assess the
accuracy of an algorithm when you only get a few tries because running it is
expensive; he promptly told us about his experience with this problem, which
he encountered driving plutonium nuggets across Richland, Washington. After
the video from the ACM conference on personal workstations got published here,
I learned for the first time he'd been fired from MIT three times for
insubordination, and I never got a chance to ask him what the story there
was...

Oh! And he actually made a physical turing machine good enough to do fairly
sophisticated computations on. It ended up in my father's intro CS class at
Princeton for many years.

And HN will of course appreciate one of his favorite one-liners:

Did you know that 49 is the lowest number that can be expressed as the square
of 7 in only one way?

~~~
ohjeez
I am so envious of your experience.

My grandfather had his own achievements (including saving about 1,000 people
from Hitler's concentration camps by arranging for transport out of Germany).
But it sounds like your grandfather was much more fun to talk to.

~~~
dbfclark
He'd talk about computers for fun, at least. But try to convince him that the
internet actually _worked_ and you'd have a whole evening's conversation on
your hands...

~~~
bliti
I'm still on the fence, too. The internet is still too young of an experiment.
We are now at a stage where machines themselves are going online. I'm sure he
would have loved seeing the next 24 Yeats unravel.

------
chl
To learn more about the LINC (and why, in the grand scheme of things, it was
so incredibly important):

\- "The LINC Revolution", in "Biomedical Computing" by Joseph November:
[http://www.amazon.com/Biomedical-Computing-Digitizing-
Univer...](http://www.amazon.com/Biomedical-Computing-Digitizing-University-
Historical/dp/1421404680)

\- "Computing in the Middle Ages" by Severo Ornstein:
[http://www.amazon.com/Computing-Middle-Ages-
Trenches-1955-19...](http://www.amazon.com/Computing-Middle-Ages-
Trenches-1955-1983/dp/1403315175/)

\- "The Dream Machine" by M. Mitchell Waldrop: [http://www.amazon.com/The-
Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Dream-
Machine-Licklider-Revolution/dp/014200135X)

R.I.P.

------
jamespitts
I think one key to understanding his work is to understand how he helped make
computers more accessible.

Among many things, he believed that "a computer should be just another piece
of lab equipment." That they should be a basic tool.

Clark designed "small" computers, and it is no coincidence that the Linc was
later marketed by Digital Equipment, a company all about the minicomputer that
greatly increased computing accessibility. This company and the open academic
culture that Clark was a huge part of led to greater accessibility software
too. Would we have the world of Unix without the PDP series and the culture
around it? Probably not!

Clark's role in computers was to be among the leaders of a sort of rebellion
against monolithic and expensive computing, and his work led us the world of
personal computing and open source software.

~~~
dbfclark
Indeed -- it's struck me recently how Wes was probably among the first (if not
necessarily number one, if only because of ill-definedness) people to make
computers smaller. Looking back at the sixty years since he began, it's been
quite something.

------
andypatros
I had the delightful opportunity to speak with Wes in May-June of 2015 via
telephone on a number occasions.

I have been researching an image called the Digital Mona Lisa for many years,
and in a round of searching last year, I came upon Wes's name in association
with the creator of the Digital Mona Lisa, H. Philip Peterson, as they both
worked on the TX-0 and TX-2 early computing projects. Wes was the project
director as we all know.

I decided to give Wes a phone, (and keep in mind I didn't know him prior), and
see if he could help me learn more about Mr. Peterson. Once we started talking
in that first phone conversation it was like I had known him for years. A
simply wonderful, engaging person that helped me learn more about Mr. Peterson
but importantly I got to know about Wes and his vast interesting career,
(being at a conference where Oppenheimer was part of the event, his early days
at the Hanford nuclear facility, his contribution to the ARPA project and much
more). Fascinating stuff from a fascinating person!!

I also found out that Mr. Peterson's first name was Harold, but Wes said he
liked to be called Phil and that Mr. Peterson was born in Utah, among other
items.

Wes asked me if my last name was of greek descent, which I am, and he
proceeded to speak to me in greek. His wit and humor are two things I'll
always remember about him, even from such a brief time we spent getting to
know one another.

He certainly was a computing pioneer. I hope that his memory is eternal and
that we look to past to learn from the careers of others like Wes that paved
the way forward.

------
ErikAugust
"Clark next led hardware design for the TX-2 with a focus on graphical
interactivity. MIT doctoral student Ivan Sutherland realized that Clark's
system enabled human-computer interaction concepts dreamed of 20 years prior
by another MIT-trained engineering legend, Vannevar Bush. Sutherland used
TX-2's light pen and screen to develop a graphical design application called
Sketchpad."

Both the genesis of the GUI and object-oriented programming took place right
there.

------
fernly
The systems named, TX-0 and TX-2, tweaked my recollection of items I'd seen
while cataloging at CHM. There are a number of items related to the TX-0[1]
including a picture[2] but also quite a number of its unique circuit
modules[3], which were small plastic cylinders with 7-pin bases. Each cylinder
held a couple of transistors and other components, approximating one gate per
"bottle".

CHM also has a quantity of TX-2 items[4] such as this picture[5] and numerous
of its circuit modules[6], which were narrow 2"x6.5" circuit boards.

[1]
[http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/search/?s=tx-0](http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/search/?s=tx-0)

[2]
[http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102630740](http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102630740)

[3]
[http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102733906](http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102733906)

[4]
[http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/search/?s=tx-2](http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/search/?s=tx-2)

[5]
[http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102622491](http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102622491)

[6]
[http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102677413](http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102677413)

------
agumonkey
I tend to think that I know the important parts of this field history and yet
I knew zero facts about that man which seems to be both technically and
humanly inspiring.

------
dekhn
TX-2 is still underrated for the level of innovation and impact it had.

------
myohan
RIP...he died same age as Marvin Minsky who died a month ago.

~~~
dbfclark
Quite. Minsky was actually advisor to my company, which is based in part on
his notion of common sense computing. There is much to mourn recently.

