Bio: Mary Allen Wilkes
Mary Allen Wilkes worked in the computer field for 11 years before turning to a career as a lawyer. As a computer programmer in the 1960s at MIT, she participated in the development of the LINC computer and wrote its system software, including its interactive operating system LAP6, one of the earliest such systems for a personal computer. Her work was recognized in Great Britain's National Museum of Computing's 2013 exhibition "Heroines of Computing" at Bletchley Park, and by the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn, Germany, in its 2015-16 exhibition, Am Anfang war Ada: Frauen in der Computergeschichte (In the beginning was Ada: Women in Computer History).
Wilkes is a graduate of Wellesley College and the Harvard Law School. She practiced law in the Boston area for over 35 years, including practice as a trial lawyer, an Assistant District Attorney for Middlesex County, an arbitrator for the American Arbitration Association, and an instructor in the Trial Advocacy Workshop at the Harvard Law School. She also served for eight years as a judge of the Annual Willem C. VIS International Commercial Arbitration Moot competition in Vienna, Austria, organized by Pace University Law School.
Wilkes is the author of "Conversational Access to a 2048-Word Machine" about the LINC operating system (Comm. of the Association for Computing Machinery 13, 7, pp. 407–14, July 1970) and "Scroll Editing: an On-line Algorithm for Manipulating Long Character Strings," which describes the LAP6 document editing function (IEEE Trans. on Computers 19, 11, pp. 1009–15, November 1970).
Wilkes at LINC, 1962
Wilkes at LINC, 1963
Wilkes, 1966
Wilkes at Vintage Computer Festival, Mountain View, 2007
Wilkes at Vintage Computer Festival, Mountain View, 2007