November 3, 2007 5:00 PM PDT
The centerpiece of this year's Vintage Computer Festival is the LINC, or Laboratory Instrument Computer. It was invented in 1961 by Wes Clark, left, and Mary Allen Wilkes, who wrote the original operating system for LINC. It was created to provide a way for biomedical researchers to record data from experiments and view the results in real time. At the time, it was considered a small computer that individual labs would use to translate information from analog to digital. The data is stored on magnetic tape on spools 3 inches in diameter.
Photo by Robert Balousek/CNET Networks
