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J.C.R. Licklider
This nOde last updated November 23rd, 2001 and is permanently morphing...
(1 Ix (Wind) - 12 Ceh (Red) - 12.19.8.13.14)

J.C.R. Licklider, an experimental psychologist at MIT who became the director of The Information Processing Techniques Office of the U.S. Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), was the one man whose vision enabled hundreds of other like-minded computer designers to pursue a whole new direction in hardware and  software development. In the early 1960s, theresearchers funded by Licklider's programs reconstructed computer science on a new and  higher level, through an approach known as time-sharing.

Although their sponsorship was military, thepeople Licklider hired or supported were working toward a transformationthat he and they believed to be social as well as technological.Licklider saw the new  breed of interactive computers his project directors were creating as  the first step toward an entirely new kind ofhuman communication capability.

-_Tools For Thought_ by Howard Rheingold

Origins of the Internet

The first recorded description of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962  discussing his "Galactic Network" concept. He envisioned a globally interconnected set of nodes through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site. In spirit, the  concept was very much like the Internet of today. Licklider was the first head of the computer research program at DARPA,  starting in October 1962. While at DARPA he convinced his successors at ARPA, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, of the importance of this networking concept.
  

authored book _Man-Computer Symbiosis_

Licklider's research specialty was psychoacoustics.  During World War II, he had explored ways electronics could be applied to understanding human communications. Specifically, he wanted to learn how the human ear and brain are able to convert atmospheric vibrations into the perception of distinct sounds. After the way, MIT was the center of a number of different attempts to use electronic mechanisms to model parts of the nervous system--a movement in biology and psychology as well as engineering that was inspired by the work of Norbert Wiener and others in the interdisciplinary field of cybernetics.  Licklider was one of the researchers attracted to this paradigm, not strictly out of the desire to build a new kind of machine, but out of the need for new ways to simulate the activities of the human brain. This need, inspired by cybernetics, was extended simultaneously into engineering and physiology. Computers were the last thing on Licklider's mind--until his theoretical models of human perceptual mechanisms got out of hand.

The fig tree is pollinated only by the insect Blastophaga grossorum. The larva of the insect  lives in the ovary of the fig tree, and there it gets its food. The tree and the insect are thus heavily interdependent: the tree cannot reproduce without the insect; the insect cannot eat without the tree; together, they constitute not only a viable but a productive and thriving partnership. This cooperative "living together in intimate association, or even close union, of two dissimilar organisms" is called symbiosis.

"Man-computer symbiosis" is a subclass of man-machine systems. There are many man-machine systems. At present, however, there are no man-computer symbioses. . . . The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computers will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human being has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.

 - Howard Rheingold - _Tools For Thought_

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