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If some geniuses who have marked the history of computer science enjoys a certain notoriety; like Ada Lovelace or Tim Berners-Lee; Others have remained a little more in the shadows. This is the case of Mary Allen Wilkes, a woman who was born in 1937 in Chicago, in an America that was slowly recovering from the ravages of the Great Depression. The Windy City, as it was nicknamed, was 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, and certainly not for computer science. Yet she was the very first person in the world to use a home computer.
At a time when women were underrepresented in the field of computer science, Mary Allen Wilkes showed that women could excel in the field. © Mary Allen WIlkes personal archive/Wikipedia
From Philosophy to Programming
In the late 1950s, when computer science was still in its infancy in government and university labs, Mary Allen Wilkes was completing her studies in philosophy and theology at Wellesley College, one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the world. Her initial aspiration was to pursue a career in law; she wanted to become a lawyer; a vocation that was quickly thwarted by the prejudices of her time. Women, he is told, have no place in the courts.
This social resistance could have crushed her ambitions, but an almost prophetic phrase, uttered years earlier by her geography teacher, then took on its full meaning: “Mary Allen, when you grow up, you should become a computer programmer“. She was then only in fourth grade and these words resonated like an invitation to explore new horizons. In a context where women struggled to find their place in traditional legal professions, the emerging computer science paradoxically offered more accessible opportunities.
This is how she crossed the doors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), joining the teams of the Lincoln Laboratory. In the years 1959-1960, this research center embodied the high place of emerging computer science. There she discovered a universe 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 at the time.
Under the direction of Oliver Selfridge, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, and Benjamin Gold, a signal processing expert, Wilkes plunged 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 that required programming these colossal machines in their native language, assembler, a task requiring rigor and creativity. This seminal 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, her career took off when she joined the team of Wesley A. Clark, who designed the TX-0 computers, which were used to develop word processing software and operating systems; and TX-2, which enabled the development of the first computer-aided design software.
The LINC (Laboratory INstrument Computer) project emerged from a bold vision: to design a personal computer ahead of its time, compact enough to fit on a desk and accessible enough to be handled by biomedical scientists. Recall that at the time, computers weighed several tons.
The LINC computer, on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. © Don DeBold/Wikipedia
Wilkes' contribution the development of LINC was fundamental. She began by simulating the behavior of the future machine on the TX-2, a masterful work that allowed her to refine the architecture of the system even before its physical construction. She designed then 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 migrated to MIT's Center for Computing Technologies for the Biomedical Sciences. Wilkes played a central role in training early LINC users, as part of a pioneering program funded by the National Institutes of Health.
She then developed the first LINC assembly programs (LAPs), creating a programming environment that allowed researchers to run their experiments and analyze their data without any computer science expertise. In partnership with Wesley A., she also wrote the LINC programming manual. This constituted a veritable Bible for users of the machineand ensured the project's sustainability by allowing researchers to continue using and developing LINC even after Wilkes left.
Mary Allen Wilkes: The First Teleworker in History
As the core LINC team moved to Washington University in St. Louis to establish the Computer Systems Laboratory, Wilkes made a surprising decision. She chose to continue her work from her family home in Baltimore, transforming a domestic space into a laboratory for technological innovation. Unknowingly, she gave birth to telework, 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 2,048 12-bit words of memory, but which then represented considerable computing power for personal use.
Mary Allen Wikes at her home, with LINC in the background. © Rex B. Wilkes/Wikipedia
In this unusual environment, she developed LAP6, an operating system far ahead of its time. Wilkes incorporated a revolutionary technique for scrolling text, based on an algorithm proposed by his colleagues Mishell J. Stucki and Severo M. Ornstein. This innovation allowed for the first time a fluid and intuitive manipulation of digital documents, well before the era of graphical interfaces.
The system offered features that had never been seen before: real-time editing, interactive manipulation of programs, and most importantly, the ability to switch instantly between writing code and running it—a feature that would become standard in modern development environments.
With the LAP6, users could for the first time exchange programs via LINC magnetic tapes, creating an early form of shared software library. All this, without needing to be connected to any network.
In 1975, completing the loop of his atypical career, Wilkes eventually became a lawyer. Still alive and aged 87 today, her legacy lives on: the British National Museum of Computing honoured her in its exhibition “Heroines of Computing” in 2013, while the Heinz Nixdorf Museum Forum in Germany celebrates her contribution in ” Am Anfang war Ada: Frauen in der Computergeschichte “.
It is therefore partly thanks to Wilkes' hard work that this article was written and that it is now possible to have compact and powerful computers. Which shows that the professional reconversion 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 in the 1960s.
- She developed LAP6, an innovative interactive operating system that allowed researchers to conduct experiments and analyze data.
- By installing a LINC in her home in Baltimore, she became the first teleworker in history.
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