Molnar, Charles Edwin

(b. 14 March 1935 in Newark, New Jersey; d. 13 December 1996 in Sunnyvale, California), computer scientist who codesigned the machine considered the world’s first personal computer.

Molnar was the only child of Louis Molnar, who was born in Nógrádszakal, Hungary, and Mildred Knelly, a native of New Jersey. His father worked in a mattress factory, and his mother was a secretary. His interests included music, furniture building, hiking, and canoeing. After graduating from Perth Amboy High School in 1952, Molnar entered Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and received a B.S. degree in 1956 and an M.S. degree in 1957. Both degrees were in electrical engineering. He married Donna Addicott on 31 August 1957. They had two sons. Molnar earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1965. His dissertation concerned the mechanics of the inner ear and how it translates auditory signals into neural responses.

From 1957 to 1961 Molnar was a staff associate with the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT. He was in the U.S. Air Force from 1961 to 1964 and assigned as a lieutenant to Hanscom Field in Lexington, Massachusetts, which was adjacent to the laboratory. Although assigned to Hanscom, he was allowed to work at the lab because the air force was interested in his research. In 1962 he worked with a team of designers led by Wesley A. Clark in developing the Laboratory Instrument Computer (LINC). The LINC, which Molnar used in his dissertation work, featured a keyboard with an alphanumeric-graphical display unit for interactive uses and a block-addressed tape unit—which operated like the later diskette units—with pocket-sized reels that captured both data, in either digital or analog form, and programs prepared on-line by the user. The machine, one of the few unclassified projects at the laboratory in the early 1960s, had a basic operating system with a small display, and the programs were stored on a magnetic tape. Doctors and medical researchers were expected to use the self-contained machine, which was relatively small and inexpensive for its day and was specifically designed for individual use. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society acknowledged it as the first personal computer.

The LINC was of insignificant power compared to later personal computers, and at the time many scientists believed in time-sharing computers. The LINC project received a grant from the National Institutes of Health, and Molnar’s group placed twenty machines, early prototypes of the computer, in various biomedical research laboratories. In 1965 the Digital Equipment Corporation introduced the computer commercially.

Molnar and Clark obtained a patent in August 1972 for using cable television lines to send data and computer programs from central computers to less expensive bedside terminals in intensive care units. Under the direction of Molnar and Clark, Macromodules, a set of computer building blocks, were designed and fabricated. The primary goal was to simplify the task of building computer systems. Designing a computer system consisted of drawing a flow chart, then plugging modules into a structure that supplied power, cooling, and most connections, and finally connecting cables in one-to-one correspondence with the flow chart. Unlike most computer systems, macromodular systems operated without fixed timing. Molnar went on to develop radical improvements in the theory and practice of such asynchronous systems design. Eventually, computer systems were developed from these modules for use in molecular graphics, drug design, and detection of cardiac arrhythmias from electrocardiograms.

In 1965 Molnar became an associate professor of physiology and biophysics at Washington University in St. Louis, where he stayed for thirty years. He collaborated with Russell R. Pfeiffer in 1966 to establish the Sensory Biophysics Laboratory in the physiology department of the university. They investigated the functioning of the cochlea, the sensory organ of hearing. Molnar became an associate professor of electrical engineering in 1967 and was an associate director of the Computer Systems Laboratory from 1967 to 1972. He became a professor of physics and electrical engineering in 1971 and the director of the Computer Systems Laboratory in 1972.

In 1983 Molnar established the Institute for Biomedical Computing, which increased interest in biomedical computing within the Schools of Engineering and Medicine, and he became the institute’s director. His efforts to bridge the cultural gap between the schools were successful because of his fundamental research, ranging from computer design to auditory physiology, which drew on his previous dissertation work. He remained the institute’s director until 1992.

Molnar was a member of the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine from 1980 to 1984. He and Clark received the 1983 Director’s Award from the National Institutes of Health for their work on the LINC. Molnar also received the 1985 Jacob Javits Distinguished Neuroscience Investigator Award from the National Institutes of Health. An award for the best paper bridging theory and practice was named after Molnar at the Async 97, the third international symposium on advanced research in asynchronous circuits and systems, held in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Molnar was also a visiting professor at the University of Chile, the California Institute of Technology, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Eindhoven University of Technology, and the University of Waterloo in Belgium, making extended visits to each institution.

In 1995 Molnar left Washington University to become a senior research fellow and director of the Science Office at Sun Microsystems in Mountain View, California, where he had been consulting since 1990. The LINC was retired in 1996.

Molnar was a charismatic individual, six feet one inch tall with dark hair that grayed early. He died at the age of sixty-one of complications from diabetes and high blood pressure. According to his wishes, his body was donated to science at the San Francisco Medical Center.

Molnar had a worldwide reputation as a pioneer in self-timed computer system theory, a design approach for ultra-fast computers. He was a curious researcher, and his discoveries helped usher in the computer age.

For further information on Molnar, see J. A. N. Lee’s article in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 21, no. 3 (1999): 67–69, and Tom Verhoeff, ed., Encyclopedia of Delay-Insensitive Systems (1995–1998). An obituary is in the New York Times (16 Dec. 1996).

Martin Jay Stahl