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J. C. R. Licklider

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J. C. R. Licklider

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (March 11, 1915 – June 26, 1990), known simply as J.C.R. or "Lick" was an American computer scientist, considered one of the most important figures in computer science and general computing history. After early work in psychoacoustics, he became interested in information technology early in his career. Much like Vannevar Bush, J.C.R. Licklider's contribution to the development of the Internet consists of ideas, not inventions. He foresaw the need for networked computers with easy user interfaces. His ideas foretold of graphical computing, point-and-click interfaces, digital libraries, e-commerce, online banking, and software that would exist on a network and migrate wherever it was needed. He has been called "computing's Johnny Appleseed" for having planted the seeds of computing in the digital age.

Licklider was instrumental in conceiving, funding and managing the research that led to modern personal computers and the Internet. His seminal paper on Man-Computer Symbiosis foreshadowed interactive computing, and he went on to fund early efforts in time-sharing and application development, most notably the work of Douglas Engelbart, who founded the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute and created the famous On-Line System. He played a similar role in conceiving of and funding early networking research, most notably the ARPAnet. His 1968 paper on The Computer as a Communication Device predicts the use of computer networks to support communities of common interest and collaboration without regard to location.

Early life

Licklider was born in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. He was the only child of an insurance salesman and his wife. He displayed early engineering talent, building model airplanes. He carried on with his hobby of refurbushing automobiles throughout his life.

A SAGE operator's terminal.

He studied at Washington University in St. Louis, where he received a BA in 1937, majoring in physics, math and psychology, and an MA in psychology in 1938. He received a doctorate in psychoacoustics from the University of Rochester in 1942, and worked at the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory at Harvard University from 1943 to 1950. He became interested in information technology, and moved to MIT in 1950 as an associate professor, where he served on a committee that established MIT Lincoln Laboratory and established a psychology programme for engineering students. He worked on a Cold War project known as Semi Automatic Ground Environment (better known by its acronym "SAGE"), designed to create a computer-aided air defense system. The SAGE system included computers that collected and presented data to a human operator, who then chose the appropriate response. In 1957, he became a Vice President at Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc., where he bought the first production PDP-1 computer and conducted the first public demonstration of time-sharing. He was elected president of the Acoustical Society of America in 1958.

In 1960, Licklider wrote his famous paper Man-Computer Symbiosis, which outlined the need for simpler interaction between computers and computer users. Licklider has been credited as an early pioneer of cybernetics and AI. [1] Unlike many AI practitioners, Licklider never felt that men would be replaced by computer-based beings. As he wrote in that article: "Men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking."

Licklider formulated the earliest ideas of a global computer network in August 1962 at BBN, in a series of memos discussing the "Galactic Network" concept. These ideas contained almost everything that the Internet is today. His paper The Computer as a Communication Device, Science and Technology, April 1968, illustrates his vision of network applications.

In October 1962, Licklider was appointed head of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at ARPA, the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He would then convince Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and Lawrence G. Roberts that an all-encompassing computer network was a very important concept. During his two-year term of office, he granted funding to develop Project MAC at MIT, a large mainframe computer that was designed to be shared by up to 30 simultaneous users, each sitting at a separate typewriter terminal. He also granted funding to similar projects at Stanford University, UCLA Berkeley, and the System Development Corporation, all in California, and to the Knowledge Augmentation Laboratory at the Stanford Research Institute, headed by Douglas Englebart, which later invented the computer mouse.

In 1968, J.C.R. Licklider became director of Project MAC at MIT, and a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering. Project MAC had produced the first computer time-sharing system, CTSS, and one of the first online setups with the development of Multics (work on which commenced in 1964). Multics was the direct ancestor of the Unix operating system developed at Bell Labs by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie in 1970.

He retired and became a professor emeritus in 1985. He died in Arlington, Massachusetts.

References

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