Charles Molnar

Charles Edwin Molnar ( born March 14, 1935 in Newark, New Jersey; † 13 December 1996, Sunnyvale, California ) was an American computer engineer and biophysicist.

Life

Molnar studied electrical engineering at Rutgers University with a bachelor's degree in 1956 and a master's degree in 1957. As a student he developed with Wesley A. Clark at the Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1961 the LINC computer ( Laboratory for Instrument Computer ). He is considered the one of the first mini-computer ( other early Minis were the PDP - 1 of 1959) and as this forerunner of the personal computer. In 1966 he received his doctorate at MIT with a thesis on numerical models for the functioning of the cochlea ( cochlear ) (Model for the Convergence of Inputs Upon neuron in the cochlear nucleus ). He turned in his research on the cochlea at the time of his LINC computer.

Molnar was later with Clark at Washington University in St. Louis, where he was Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, Faculty of Medicine and later Professor of Biomedical Computing from 1965 to 1984 Associate founder and first director of the Institute for Biomedical Computing ( IBC). In 1995 he left the university and worked for Sun Microsystems, among others Ivan Sutherland on pipeline architectures.

For the development of the LINC he received the prize of the Director of the National Institutes of Health with Clark and 1983.