[rescue] Does any one on the list run this?

[Carl R. Friend]

    On Fri, 7 Jun 2013, r.stricklin wrote:

> On Jun 7, 2013, at 7:12 PM, John Francini wrote:
>
>> The TX-2?  I was originally going to say PDP-1, but that shipped in 1963.
>
> I was about to guess "sketchpad", which is perhaps where you were going... but
> I think probably he's thinking of the IBM 610.

    Actually I was thinking about the LINC (Laboratory INstrumentation
Computer) that was designed at Lincoln Labs for use in the biomedical
field.  The project was  begin in 1961 and the first public showing
of the machine was in 1962; the first 25 examples were actually built
by the researchers who were going to use them in the field (now that's
personal!).

    The LINC was the first machine explicitly designed for one person
(an experimentor in a lab) to use and interact with and had an array
of real-world control and sensing capabilities that led to not only
the original devicees to have long lifetimes but also the follow-on
devices (the LINC-8 and PDP-12) as well.  My small consortium in
Rhode Island (RCS/RI) have three -12s in our collection, one of which
is fully operational, and all three were still in active use in the
late 1990s -- which isn't bad considering the design was from 1969
for an operational lifetime of 30 years.  (Nothing in the PC realm
had really gotten close enough in capability and interface to displace
the -12s.)

+------------------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin)            | West Boylston       |
| Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast            | Massachusetts, USA  |
| mailto:crfriend at rcn.com                        +---------------------+
| http://users.rcn.com/crfriend/museum           | ICBM: 42:22N 71:47W |
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