In 1965, Mary Allen Wilkes wrote LAP6 for the LINC computer from her parents' Baltimore home, testing an interactive operating system on a 250-pound machine in the living room and becoming the first known person to use a personal computer at home, twelve years before the Apple II reached buyers (opens in new tab)

In 1965, Mary Allen Wilkes was writing software in her parents’ Baltimore home for a computer that weighed about 250 pounds and sat in the living room like a piece of laboratory equipment that had wandered into the wrong century. The machine was the LINC, short for Laboratory Instrument Computer. It had a small display, […]