The Dream Machine: JCR Licklider

A long time ago, I remember when I was at the University of Wisconsin, I took piles of "don't fold, staple, or mutilate" punch cards into an air-conditioned basement. I put punch cards with rubber strips, carefully programmed to execute on a mainframe computer, in a small room, and get back a long printout the next day. It usually indicates some small bug in my program, which means I have to repeat the whole exercise.

Of course, now we use PCs to send emails, buy books, book rooms, do research, do simulation experiments, play games, listen to music, and write book reviews, all in the relative privacy of our own homes and at our own convenience ongoing.

InThe Dream Machine , M. Mitchell Waldrop wrote a monumental history of ideas, individuals and groups, from punch cards to personal computers Ideas, individuals and groups have made us what we are today. He wrote about the theoretical concepts of abstract computing developed in the 1930s and 1940s, the impetus provided by World War II and the "Cold War", the development of programming and business applications in the 1950s, and in the early 1960s, some people began Realize that "batch processing" of punched cards will never allow computers to realize their potential to complement human skills. Improvements to these ideas were also sketched in the 70s and 80s, particularly at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. Waldrop, author of Complexity and Man-Made Minds, ties together multiple histories through the story of JCR Licklider , Licklider De was a visionary and knowledgeable psychologist from Missouri who, while working at MIT, industry, and the Pentagon, directed much of the creation of computing as we know it today.

The book is at times full of competition for project funding and appropriate research priorities, in which Licklider is always on the side of those in favor of decentralization, connectivity, interactivity, and graphical interfaces, against those from industry and Military bureaucrats who are content with the top-down nature of mainframe batch processing. He is a persuasive evangelist. After an academic career in cognitive psychology, he was appointed in 1962 to head an ARPA (U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) group, established by the Pentagon after the launch of Sputnik in the former Soviet Union, responsible for Study "command and control," the making and execution of military decisions in real time. He convinced people that his pursuit of interactivity served ARPA's needs well, and he used a $10 million-a-year budget to realize his interactive computing dreams.

To avoid taxonomic research, he started funding the MAC project at MIT, a massive project for a large-scale time-sharing system. Long before Apple computers, MAC stood for Multi-Access Computer and Machine-Aided Cognition , including Marvin Minsky's Artificial Intelligence Lab. He also supported the work of John McCarthy, the inventor of the time-sharing system; projects by the RAND Corporation and Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), Allen Newell and Silber Herbert Simon's "bounded rationality"; and Douglas Engelbart of SRI International, who later developed the mouse, hypertext, and windows.

Licklider is a catalyst, an enzyme that has sparked groundbreaking research. Later, in order to facilitate the fruitful collaborations he produced among widely dispersed researchers, he suggested connecting them with a network of computers. He presciently wrote about the merits of many subsequent technological developments, including magnetic and optical disks, online libraries and software, much like the Java applets that are now ubiquitous on the World Wide Web. The network he proposed became the Arpanet, which eventually evolved into the Internet and the network itself.

An appealing feature of The Dream Machine is its comprehensiveness. Most of the big names are here with a brief overview of their thoughts. Using techniques common to popular scientific writing, Waldrop gives us not only Alan Turing's description of abstract computers, but also his tragic death at the age of 41. An introduction to John von Neumann's work on computer architecture and his lightning-fast story of mental arithmetic. Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener. Anticipation of Hypertext by Vannevar Bush. Claude Shannon's information theory and psychologist George Miller and linguist Noam Chomsky's rebuttal to behaviorism.

There are many lesser known names, including Lawrence G. Roberts, Wesley Clark, Edward Feigenbaum, Ivan Sutherland , Kenneth Olsen, Robert Fano, Robert W. Taylor, Alan Kay. One of them was Paul Baran, one of the many "fathers of the Internet" who invented packet switching in order to make communications less vulnerable or disrupted. Packets are transmitted individually and follow the most efficient path to their destination. When they all arrive, they are combined into the original message. Without any big switches and fixed routes, as Licklider would like, the internet is decentralized and free from any localized disruption.

While impressive, the sheer amount of research in the book may generate some debate about primacy; such a book usually does. The bigger problem for most readers is that the book occasionally gets boring and risks getting bogged down in a sea of details and acronyms. But Waldrop periodically returns to the topic of computer accessibility and Licklider's personal trajectory, the political environment around him, which he mentions gives us a sense of direction as we read.

Ultimately, the answer to the question of why Licklider is unknown becomes clearer. He's not a media guy, he didn't start a company, he didn't invent gadgets, and he didn't write any software. Yet he is the ideal bureaucrat whose vast knowledge and selfless enthusiasm help connect America and the world, and help America and the world get out of the icy basement of punched cards.

Compiled from: The Electric Psychologist , a 2001 book review by The New York Times