A computer moved into the house
When Mary Allen Wilkes asked to continue her work on the LINC from her parents’ home in Baltimore, MIT shipped the machine there. The LINC was not a small desktop computer: it was a refrigerator-size system built for laboratory work. Its arrival made Wilkes’s home a place where she could work directly with the computer, rather than merely prepare instructions elsewhere and send them to a distant machine.
Programming meant working with the machine
Wilkes was a programmer, and the LINC’s software had to make the computer practical for people doing research. Unlike systems that handled work mainly in batches, the LINC let a user interact with it through a keyboard and screen. That made it possible to enter instructions, see results, and revise a program in a more immediate cycle—a useful arrangement for researchers testing ideas and working with experimental data.
The machine’s size and specialized purpose still set firm limits: bringing it home required shipping substantial equipment, not plugging in an ordinary household device. But the arrangement shifted where computing work could happen. The important change was not a network connection; it was that the computer itself could be installed where its programmer worked. Wilkes’s Baltimore setup is an early, unusually concrete example of work from home with a computer decades before personal computers became commonplace.
