If certain geniuses who have marked the history of computing enjoy a certain notoriety; like Ada Lovelace or Tim Berners-Lee; others remained a little more in the shade. This is the case of Mary Allen Wilkes, a woman who was born in 1937 in Chicago, America, and was slowly recovering from the ravages of the Great Depression. The Windy Cityas it is nicknamed, was then a microcosm of what the entire country was experiencing: a changing metropolis, marked by profound social inequalities, but also by cultural effervescence and a desire for renewal.
Mary Allen Wilkes was not destined for engineering or science, much less computer science. However, she became the first person in the world to use a computer at home.
From philosophy to programming
In the late 1950s, when computing was still in its infancy in government and university laboratories, Mary Allen Wilkes completed his studies in philosophy and theology at Wellesley Collegeone of the most prestigious higher education institutions in the world. Her first aspiration led her towards the law; she wanted to become a lawyer; a vocation quickly thwarted by the prejudices of his time. Women, he is told, have no place in the courts.
This social resistance could have crushed his ambitions, but an almost prophetic sentence, uttered years earlier by his geography teacher, then took on its full meaning: “ Mary Allen, when you grow up you should become a computer programmer “. She was only in fourth grade at the time and these words resonated as an invitation to explore new horizons. In a context where women struggled to find their place in traditional legal professions, emerging IT paradoxically offers more accessible opportunities.
This is how she entered the doors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), joining the teams at the Lincoln Laboratory. In the years 1959-1960, this research center embodied the mecca of emerging computing. There she discovered a world dominated by the imposing IBM 704 and 709, veritable electronic cathedrals occupying entire rooms. These machines, equipped with a ferrite core memory and a vacuum tube processor, represented the cutting edge of technology of the time.
Under the leadership of artificial intelligence pioneer Oliver Selfridge and signal processing expert Benjamin Gold, Wilkes dove into a pioneering voice recognition project. This initiative aimed to decode the acoustic patterns of human speech by transforming them into analyzable digital data.
An undertaking which required programming these colossal machines in their native language, assembler, a task requiring rigor and creativity. This founding experience laid the foundations for technologies that have become ubiquitous today : voice assistants and automatic transcription.
The LINC adventure: the origins of personal computing
In 1961, his career took off when she joined Wesley A. Clark’s teamdesigner of the TX-0 computers; used to develop word processing software and operating systems; and TX-2, which made it possible to develop the first computer-assisted drawing software.
The LINC (Laboratory INstrument Computer) project emerged from a bold vision: to design a personal computer before its time, compact enough to fit on a desk and accessible enough to be manipulated by researchers in biomedical sciences. Remember that at the time, computers weighed several tons.
Wilkes’ contribution to the development of LINC was fundamental. She began by simulating the behavior of the future machine on the TX-2, a work of art that allowed her to refine the architecture of the system even before its physical construction. She then designed the entire interface of the prototype console, seeking the right balance between technical power and ease of use.
The project took on a new dimension when it moved to MIT’s Center for Computing Technologies for Biomedical Sciences. Wilkes played a central role in training the first LINC users, as part of a pioneering program funded by the National Institutes of Health.
She then developed the first LINC assembly programs (LAP), creating a programming environment that allowed researchers to control their experiments and analyze their data without any computer expertise. In partnership with Wesley A., she also wrote the LINC programming manual. This constituted a true Bible for machine users and ensured the sustainability of the project by allowing researchers to continue to use and develop the LINC, even after Wilkes’ departure.
Mary Allen Wilkes: the first teleworker in history
As the core team of the LINC project moved to Washington University in St. Louis to found the Computer Systems Laboratory, Wilkes made a decision that was surprising to say the least. She chooses to continue his work from the family home in Baltimorethus transforming a domestic space into a technological innovation laboratory. Without knowing it, she gave birth to teleworking, long before the concept was popularized.
In the basement of this Baltimore house, Wilkes installed a LINC computer – a configuration that seems modest today with its memory of 2048 12-bit words, but which then represented considerable computing power for personal use.
In this unusual environment, she developed LAP6, an operating system way ahead of its time. Wilkes incorporated a revolutionary text scrolling technique, based on an algorithm proposed by his colleagues Mishell J. Stucki and Severo M. Ornstein. This innovation allows for the first time fluid and intuitive handling of digital documents, well before the era of graphical interfaces.
The system offered previously unpublished features : real-time editing, interactive manipulation of programs, and most importantly, the ability to instantly switch between writing code and executing it – a feature that will become the norm in modern development environments.
With the LAP6, users could for the first time exchange their programs via LINC magnetic tapes, creating an early form of shared software library. All this, without the need to be connected to any network.
In 1975, coming full circle in his atypical career, Wilkes eventually becomes a lawyer. Still alive and now aged 87, her legacy lives on: the British National Computer Museum honored her in its exhibition “ Heroines of Computing » in 2013, while the Heinz Nixdorf Museum Forum in Germany celebrates his contribution in « Am Anfang war Ada: Frauen in der Computergeschichte “.
It is therefore, in part, thanks to the hard work of Wilkes that this article was written and that it is now possible to have compact and powerful computers. It goes to show that the professional retraining of a single person, even unexpected, can sometimes change the course of history.
- Mary Allen Wilkes programmed the LINC, considered the first personal computer, and designed its software tools as early as the 1960s.
- She developed LAP6, an innovative interactive operating system, allowing researchers to conduct their experiments and analyze their data.
- By installing a LINC in her home in Baltimore, she became the first telecommuter in history.
