Casey Ransberger wrote:
This Licklider guy is interesting. CS + psych = cool.
A lot more than cool. Lick was the guy who:
- MIT Professor
- pioneered timesharing (bought the first production PDP-1 for BBN) and
AI work at BBN
- served as the initial Program Manager at DARPA/IPTO (the folks who
funded the ARPANET)
- Director of Project MAC at MIT for a while
- wrote some really seminal papers - "Man-Computer Symbiosis"is write up
there with Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think"
/It seems reasonable to envision, for a time 10 or 15 years hence, a
'thinking center' that will incorporate the functions of present-day
libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and
retrieval./
/The picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers,
connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to
individual users by leased-wire services. In such a system, the speed of
the computers would be balanced, and the cost of the gigantic memories
and the sophisticated programs would be divided by the number of users./
- J.C.R. Licklider, Man-Computer Symbiosis
<http://memex.org/licklider.html>, 1960.
- perhaps the earliest conception of the Internet:
In a 1963 memo to "Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer
Network," Licklider theorized that a computer network could help
researchers share information and even enable people with common
interests to interact online.
(http://web.archive.org/web/20071224090235/http://www.today.ucla.edu/1999/990928looking.html)
Outside the community he kept a very low profile. One of the greats.
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
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