Computing’s Johnny Appleseed
Almost forgotten today, J.C.R. Licklider mentored the generation that
created computing as we know it.
< http://www.technologyreview.com/magazine/jan00/waldrop.asp >
... Lick headed SAGE’s human-factors team, and he saw the project as an
example of how machines and humans could work in partnership. Without
computers, humans couldn’t begin to integrate all that radar
information. Without humans, computers couldn’t recognize the
significance of that information, or make decisions. But together—ah
yes, together...
... He hit the ground running in October 1962. His strategy was to seek
out the scattered groups of researchers around the country who already
shared his dream, and nurture their work with ARPA funding. Within
months, the “ARPA community,” as it came to be known, was taking shape.
First among equals was Project MAC at MIT, founded with Lick’s
encouragement as a large-scale experiment in time-sharing and as a
prototype for the computer utility of the future. MAC—the name stood for
both “Multi-Access Computer” and “Machine-Aided Cognition”—would also
incorporate Marvin Minsky’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory.
Other major sites included Stanford, where Lick was funding a new AI
group under time-sharing inventor John McCarthy; Berkeley, where he had
commissioned another demonstration of time-sharing; Rand Corp., where he
was supporting development of a “tablet” for free-hand communication
with a computer; and Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University),
where he was funding Allen Newell, Herbert Simon and Alan Perlis to
create a “center of excellence” for computer science. Lick had also
taken a chance on a soft-spoken visionary he barely knew—Douglas
Engelbart of SRI International—whose ideas on augmenting the human
intellect with computers closely resembled his own and who had been
thoroughly ignored by his colleagues. With funding from Lick, and
eventually from NASA as well, Engelbart would go on to develop the
mouse, hypertext, on-screen windows and many other features of modern
software.
The trick, Lick knew, was to create a community in which widely
dispersed researchers could build on one another’s work instead of
generating incompatible machines, languages and software. Lick broached
this issue in an April 1963 memo to “Members and Affiliates of the
Intergalactic Computer Network”—meaning his principal investigators. The
solution was to make it extremely easy for people to work together by
linking all of ARPA’s time-sharing computers into a national system. He
wrote:
"If such a network as I envisage nebulously could be brought
into operation, we would have at least four large computers,
perhaps six or eight small computers, and a great assortment
of disc files and magnetic tape units—not to mention the
remote consoles and teletype stations—all churning away."
From the modern perspective, this little paragraph is electrifying—it is
perhaps the first written description of what we now call the Internet.
But Lick didn’t stop there. Clearly enamored by the idea, he spent most
of the rest of the memo sketching out how people might use such a
system. He described a network in which software could float free of
individual machines. Programs and data would live not on an individual
computer but on the Net—the essential notion of the Java applets now
found all over the Web.
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