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 war, 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 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.By the late 1950s, Licklider was trying to
build mathematical and electronic models of the mechanisms the brain
uses to process the perception of sounds. Part of the excitement
generated during the early days of cybernetic research came from the
prospect of studying mechanical models of living organisms to help
create theoretical models of the way those organisms function, and
vice-versa. Licklider thought he might be onto a good idea with an
intricate neural model of pitch perception, but quickly learned, to his
dismay, that his mathematical model had grown too complex to work out by
hand in a reasonable length of time, even using the analog computers
that were then available. And until the mathematical model could be
worked out, there was no hope of building a mechanical model of pitch
perception.
The idea of building a mathematical
or electronic model was meant to simplify the task of
understanding the complexities of the brain, like plotting a graph to
see the key relationships in a collection of data. But the models
themselves now began to grow unmanageably complex. Like Mauchly with his
meteorological data, twenty years before, Licklider found he was
spending more and more of his time dealing with the calculations he
needed to do to create his models, which left less time for what he
considered to be his primary occupation -- thinking about what all that
information meant. Beneath those numbers and graphs was his real
objective -- the theoretical underpinnings of human communication.
Although he was primarily interested in how the brain processes
auditory information, he felt that he was spending most of his time
putting things into files or taking them out, as well as managing the
increasing amounts of numerical data he needed to construct the models
he had in mind. Out of curiosity, he
wondered if any of his colleagues had looked into the way scientific
researchers spent their time.
When he couldn't find any time-and-motion studies of
information-shuffling researchers like himself, Licklider decided to
keep track of his own activities as he went through his normal working
day. "Although I was aware of the inadequacy of the sampling," he later
wrote, with the modesty that he is known for among his colleagues, "I
served as my own subject."
It didn't take long to discover that his main occupation, even when
he wasn't keeping records of his behavior, was centered on keeping
records of everything else. Astonishing as it must have seemed to any
self-respecting scientist like himself,
his observations revealed that about 85% of his "thinking" time was
actually spent "getting into a position to think, to make a decision, to
learn something I needed to know. Much more time went into finding or
obtaining information than into digesting it."
Like almost any other experimentalist, he couldn't begin to make
sense of psychoacoustic data until he could see it translated into the
form of graphs. Plotting the graphs took days. Even teaching his
assistants how to plot graphs took hours. As soon as the graphs were
finished and he was able to look at them, the relationships he was
seeking became immediately obvious. It was grossly inefficient and
tedious to spend days plotting graphs that took seconds to interpret.
While he had always thought of interpretation and evaluation as his
most important function as a scientist,
Licklider's analysis of his research behavior showed that most of his
tasks were clerical or mechanical: "searching, calculating,
plotting, determining the logical or dynamic consequences of a set of
assumptions or hypotheses, preparing the way for a decision or an
insight. Moreover, my choices of what to attempt or not to attempt were
determined to an embarrassingly great extent by considerations of
clerical feasibility, not intellectual capacity."
The conclusion he reached, while it doesn't sound so radical today,
was shocking when it occurred to him in 1957. A less modest man might
not have been able to bring himself to face the conclusion:
Licklider decided, on the basis of his
informal self-study, that most of the tasks that take up the time of any
technical thinker would be performed more effectively by machines.
This was a thought that was occurring to one or two other people at
about the same time -- notably
Doug Engelbart,
out in California. But because of his association with certain
military-sponsored research projects at MIT in the 1950s, there was an
important difference between Licklider and the others who dreamed of
converting computers into some kind of mind-amplifying tool. This
crucial difference was the fact that
Licklider had reached his conclusion not long before circumstances put
him at the center of power in the one institution capable of sponsoring
the creation of an entire new technology.
At that point in the history of computer technology -- a field in
which Licklider had been only tangentially involved until then -- no
respectable computer scientist would dare suggest that computer
technology ought to be totally revamped so that scientists could use
these machines to help keep track of data and build theoretical models
of the phenomena they were studying. To those who were wild enough to
make such a suggestion -- especially the young MIT computer mavericks
who were founding the field of artificial intelligence around that time
-- the idea might have seemed too obvious and too trivial to pursue.
In any case, the AI founders were more
interested in replacing the scientist than the scientist's file clerk.
Licklider, however, was neither a respectable computer scientist nor a
computer maverick, but a psychologist with some expertise in
electronics. And like any other competent investigator, he followed
where the data led him.
In the late 1950s, Licklider had no real expertise in digital
computer design, and although he knew that only a computer could give
him what he needed, he didn't think that the kinds of computers then
available, and the kinds of things they did, were suitable for building
a sort of "electronic file clerk." He
knew that data processing wasn't what he wanted.
If you were the Census Office, overflowing with information on a
couple of hundred million people, and for some crazy reason you wanted
to find out how many divorced people over sixty lived on farms in the
sun belt, you could use a UNIVAC to perform the sorting and calculating
needed to tell you what you wanted to know. That was data processing. If
you had a payroll for 10,000 employees to calculate every other Friday
and needed to transform time sheets into entries in a ledger and print
up all the checks -- data processing power was just what you could buy
from your local IBM representative.
Data processing involved certain constraints on what could be
done with computers, and constraints on how one went about doing
these things.. Payrolls, mathematical calculations, and census data were
the proper kinds of tasks An arcane process known as "batch processing"
was the proper way to do these things. If you had a problem to solve,
you had to encode your program and the data that the program was meant
to operate upon, usually in one of the two major computer languages --
FORTRAN and COBOL. The encoded program and data were converted into
boxes full of what had become universally known as "IBM cards" -- the
kind you weren't supposed to spindle, fold, or mutilate. The cards were
delivered to a systems administrator at the campus "computer center" or
the corporate "data processing center." This specialist was the only one
allowed to submit the program to the machine, and the person from whom
you would retrieve your printout hours or days later.
But if you wanted to plot ten thousand points on a line, or turn a
list of numbers into a graphic model of airflow patterns over an
airplane wing, you wouldn't want data processing or batch processing.
You would want modelling -- an exotic new use for computers that
the aircraft designers were pioneering. All Licklider sought, at first,
was a mechanical servant to take care of the clerical and calculating
work that accompanied model building. Not long after, however, he began
to wonder if computers could help formulate models as well as
calculate them.
When he attained tenure, later that same year, Licklider decided to
join a consulting firm near Cambridge named Bolt, Beranek & Newman. They
offered him an opportunity to pursue his psychoacoustic research -- and
a chance to learn about digital computers.
"BB&N had the first machine that Digital Equipment Company made, the
PDP-1," Licklider recalled in 1983. The quarter-million-dollar machine
was the first of a continuing line of what came to be called, in the
style of the midsixties, "minicomputers." Instead of costing millions of
dollars and occupying most of a room, these new, smaller, powerful
computers only cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and took up about
the same amount of space as a couple of refrigerators. But they still
required experts to operate them. Licklider therefore hired a research
assistant, a college dropout who was knowledgeable about computers, an
exceptionally capable young fellow by the name of Ed Fredkin, who was
later to become a force in artificial intelligence research -- the first
of many exceptionally capable young fellows who would be drawn to
Licklider's crusade to build a new kind of computer and create a new
style of computing.
Fredkin and others at BB&N had the PDP-1 set up so that Licklider
could directly interact with it. Instead of programming via boxes of
punched cards over a period of days, it became possible to feed the
programs and data to the machine via a high-speed paper tape; it was
also possible to change the paper tape input while the program was
running. The operator could interact with the machine for the
first time. (The possibility of this kind of interaction was duly noted
by a few other people who turned out to be influential figures in
computer history. A couple of other young computerists at MIT, John
McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, were also using a PDP-1 in ways computers
weren't usually used.)
The PDP-1 was primitive in comparison
with today's computers, but it was a breakthrough in 1960. Here was the
model builder that Licklider had first envisioned. This fast,
inexpensive, interactive computer was beginning to resemble the kind of
device he dreamed about back in his psychoacoustic lab at MIT ,
when he first realized how his ability to theorize always seemed
constrained by the effort it took to draw graphs from data.
"I guess you could say I had a kind
of religious conversion," Licklider admits, remembering how it
felt, a quarter of a century ago, to get his hands on his first
interactive computer. As he had suspected, it was indeed possible to use
computers to help build models from experimental data and to make sense
of any complicated collection of information.
Then he learned that although the computer was the right kind
of machine he needed to build his models, even the PDP-1 was hopelessly
crude for the phenomena he wanted to study. Nature was far too
complicated for 1960-style computers. He needed more memory components
and faster processing of large amounts of calculations. As he began to
think about the respective strengths and deficiencies of computers and
brains, it occurred to him that what he
was seeking was an alternative to the human-computer relationship as it
then existed.
Since the summer of 1956, when they met at Dartmouth to define the
field, several young computer and communication scientists Licklider
knew from MIT had been talking about a vaguely distant future when
machines would surpass human intelligence. Licklider was more concerned
with the shorter-term potential of computer-human relations. Even at the
beginning, he realized that technical thinkers of every kind were
starting to run up against the problems he had started noticing in 1957.
Let the AI fellows worry about ways to
build chess-playing or language translating machines. What he and a lot
of other people needed was an intelligent assistant.
Although he was convinced by his "religious conversion to interactive
computing" -- a phrase that has been used over and over again by those
who participated in the events that followed -- Licklider still knew too
little about the economics of computer technology to see how it might
become possible to actually construct an intelligent laboratory
assistant. Although he didn't know how or when computers would become
powerful enough and cheap enough to serve as "thinking tools," he began
to realize that the general-purpose computer, if it was set up in such a
way that humans could interact with it directly, could evolve into
something entirely different from the data processors and number
crunchers of the 1950s. Although the possibility of creating a personal
tool still seemed economically infeasible, the idea of modernizing a
community-based resource, like a library, began to appeal to him. He got
fired up about the idea Vannevar Bush had mentioned in 1945, the concept
of a new kind of library to fit the world's new knowledge system.
"The PDP-1 opened me up to ideas about how people and machines like
this might operate in the future," Licklider recalled in 1983, "but I
never dreamed at first that it would ever become economically feasible
to give everybody their own computer."
It did occur to him that these new computers were excellent candidates
for the super-mechanized libraries that Vannevar Bush had prophesied. In
1959, he wrote a book entitled Libraries of the Future,
describing how a computer-based system might create a new kind of
"thinking center."
The computerized library as he first described it in his book did not
involve anything as extravagant as giving an entire computer to every
person who used it. Instead he described a setup, the technical details
of which he left to the future, by which different humans could use
remote extensions of a central computer, all at the same time.
After he wrote the book, during the exhilarating acceleration of
research that began in the post-Sputnik era, Licklider discovered what
he and others who were close to developments in electronics came to call
"the rule of two": Continuing miniaturization of its most important
components means that the cost effectiveness of computer hardware
doubles every two years. It was true in 1950 and it held true in 1960,
and beyond even the wildest imaginings of the transistor
revolutionaries, it was still true in 1980. A small library of books and
articles have been written about the ways this phenomenon has fueled the
electronics revolution of the past three decades. It looks like it will
continue to operate until at least 1990, when personally affordable
computers will be millions of times more powerful than ENIAC.
Licklider then started to wonder about the possibility of devising
something far more revolutionary that even a computerized library. When
it began to dawn on him that this relentlessly exponential rate of
growth would make computers over a hundred times as powerful as the
PDP-1 at one tenth the cost within fifteen years, Licklider began to
think about a system that included both the electronic powers of the
computer and the cortical powers of the human operator. The crude
interaction between the operator and the PDP-1 might be just the
beginning of a powerful new kind of human-computer partnership.
A new kind of computer would have to evolve before this higher level
of human-machine interaction could be possible. The way the machine was
operated by people would have to change, and the machine itself would
have to become much faster and more powerful. Although he was still a
novice in digital computer design, Licklider was familiar with vacuum
tube circuitry and enough of an expert in the hybrid discipline of
"human factors engineering" to recognize that the mechanical assistant
he wanted would need capabilities that would be possible only with the
ultrafast computers he foresaw in the near future.
When he began applying the methods he had been using in human factors
research to the informational and communication activities of technical
thinkers like himself, Licklider found
himself drawn to the idea of a kind of computation that was more
dynamic, more of a dialogue , more of an aid in formulating
as well as plotting models. Licklider set forth in 1960 the
specifications for a new species of computer and a new mode of thinking
to be used when operating them, a specification that is still not fully
realized, a quarter of a century later:
The information processing equipment, for its part,
will convert hypotheses into testable models and then test the
models against data (which the human operator may designate roughly
and identify as relevant when the computer presents them for his
approval). The equipment will answer questions. It will simulate the
mechanisms and models, carry out procedures, and display the results
to the operator. It will transform data, plot graphs, ("cutting the
cake" in whatever way the human operator specifies, or in several
alternative ways if the human operator is not sure what he wants).
The equipment will interpolate, extrapolate, and transform. It will
convert static equations or logical statements into dynamic models
so the human operator can examine their behavior. In general, it
will carry out the routinizable, clerical operations that fill the
intervals between decisions.In addition,
the computer will serve as a statistical-inference, decision-theory,
or game-theory machine to make elementary evaluations of suggested
courses of action whenever there is enough basis to support a formal
statistical analysis. Finally, it will do as much diagnosis, pattern
matching, and relevance recognizing as it profitably can, but it
will accept a clearly secondary status in those areas.
The first research in the 1950s into the use of computing equipment
for assisting human control of complex systems was a direct result of
the need for a new kind of air defense command-and-control system.
Licklider, as a human factors expert, had been involved in planning
these early air defense communication systems. Like the few others who
saw this point as early as he did, he
realized that the management of complexity was the main problem to be
solved during the rest of the twentieth century and beyond. Machines
would have to help us keep track of the complications of keeping global
civilization alive and growing. And humans were going to need new ways
of attacking the big problems that would result form our continued
existence and growth.
Assuming that survival and a tolerable quality of existence are the
most fundamental needs for all sane, intelligent organisms, whether they
are of the biological or technological variety, Licklider wondered if
the best arrangement for both the human and the human-created
symbol-processing entities on this planet might not turn out to be
neither a master-slave relationship nor an uneasy truce between
competitors, but a partnership.
Then he found the perfect metaphor in nature for the future
capabilities he had foreseen during his 1957-1958 "religious conversion"
to interactive computing and during those 1958-1960 minicomputer
encounters that set his mind wandering through the informational ecology
of the future. The newfound metaphor showed him how to apply his
computer experience to his modest discovery about how technical thinkers
spend their time. The idea that resulted grew into a theory so bold and
immense that it would alter not only human history but human evolution,
if it proved to be true.
In 1960, in the same paper in which he talked about machines that
would help formulate as well as help construct theoretical models,
Licklider also set forth the concept of the kind of human-computer
relationship that he was later to be instrumental in initiating:
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.
The problems to be overcome in achieving such a partnership were only
partially a matter of building better computers and only partially a
matter of learning how minds interact with information. The most
important questions might not be about either the brain or the
technology, but about the way they are coupled.Licklider, foreseeing
the use of computers as tools to build better computers, concluded that
1960 would begin a transitional phase in which we humans would begin to
build machines capable of learning to communicate with us, machines that
would eventually help us to communicate more effectively, and perhaps
more profoundly, with one another.
By this time, he had strayed far enough off the course of his
psychoacoustic research to be seduced by the prospect of building the
device he first envisioned as a tool to help him make sense of his
laboratory data. Like Babbage who needed a way to produce accurate
logarithm tables, or Goldstine, who wanted better firing tables, or
Turing, who wanted a perfectly definite way to solve mathematical and
cryptological problems, Licklider began
to move away from his former goals as he got caught up in the excitement
of creating tools he needed.
Except Licklider wasn't an astronomer and tinkerer like Babbage, a
ballistician like Goldstine, or a mathematician and code-breaker like
Turing, but an experimental psychologist with some practical electronic
experience. He had set out to build a small model of one part of human
awareness -- pitch perception -- and ended up dreaming about machines
that could help him think about models.
As other software visionaries before and after him knew very well,
Licklider's vision, as grandiose as it might have been, wasn't enough in
itself to ensure that anything would ever happen in the real world. An
experimental psychologist, even an MIT professor, is hardly in a
position to set armies of computer engineers marching toward an
interactive future. Like von Neumann and Goldstine meeting on the
railroad platform at Aberdeen, or Mauchly and Eckert encountering each
other in an electronics class at the Moore School, Licklider happened
upon his destiny through accidental circumstances, because of the time
he spent at a place called "Lincoln Laboratory," an MIT facility for
top-secret defense research, where he was a consultant during a critical
transition period in the history of information processing.
It was his expertise in the psychology of human-machine interaction
that led Licklider to a position where he could make big things out of
his dreams. In the early and mid 1950s, MIT and IBM were involved in
building what were to be the largest computers ever built, the IBM
AN/FSQ-7, as the control centers of a whole new continental air defense
system for the United States. SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment)
was the Air Force's answer to the new problem of potential nuclear
bomber attack. The computers weighed
three hundred tons, took up twenty thousand feet of floor space, and
were delivered in eighteen large vans apiece. Ultimately, the Air Force
bought fifty-six of them.
MIT set up Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts, to design
SAGE. At the other end of the continent, System Development Corporation
in Santa Monica (the center of the aircraft industry) was founded to
create software for SAGE. Some of the thorniest problems that were
encountered on this project had to do with devising ways to make large
amounts of information available in human-readable form, quickly enough
for humans to make fast decisions about that information. It just
wouldn't do for your computers to take three days to evaluate all the
radar and radio-transmitted data before the Air Defense Command could
decide whether or not an air attack was underway.
Some of the answers to these problems were formulated in the
"Whirlwind" project at the MIT computing center, where high-speed
calculations were combined with computer controls that resembled
aircraft controls. Other answers came from specialists in human
perception (like Licklider), who devised new ways for computers to
present information to people. With the exception of the small crew of
the earlier Whirlwind project, SAGE operators were the first computer
users who were able to see information on visual display screens;
moreover, operators were able to use devices called "lightpens" to alter
the graphic displays by touching the screens. There was even a primitive
decision-making capacity built into the system: the computer could
suggest alternate courses of action, based on its model of the
developing situation.
The matter of display screens began to stray away from electronics
and into the area of human perception and cognition which was
Licklider's cue to join the computer builders. But even before Lincoln
Laboratory was established in 1953-1954, Licklider had been consulted
about the possibility of developing a new technology for displaying
computer information to human operators for the purpose of improving air
defense capabilities. Undoubtedly, the
seeds of his future ideas about human-computer symbiosis were first
planted when he and other members of what was then called "the
presentation group" considered the kinds of visual displays air defense
command centers would need.
The presentation group was where he first became acquainted with
Wesley Clark, one of MIT's foremost computer builders. Clark had been a
principle designer of Whirlwind, the most advanced computer system to
precede the SAGE project. Whirlwind, the purpose of which was to act as
a kind of flight simulator, was in many ways the first hardware ancestor
of the personal computer, because it was designed to be operated by a
single "test pilot." It was also used for modeling aerodynamic
equations. While it was only barely interactive in the sense that
Licklider desired, Whirlwind was the first computer fast enough to solve
aerodynamic equations in "real time" -- as the event that was being
modeled was actually happening. Real-time computation was not only a
practical necessity for the increasingly complicated job of designing
high-speed jet aircraft; it was a necessary prerequisite for creating
the guidance systems of rockets, the technological successors to jet
aircraft.
Ironically, by the time SAGE became fully operational in 1958, the
entire concept of ground-based air defense against bomber attack had
been made obsolete on one shocking day in October, 1957, when a little
beeping basketball by the odd name of "Sputnik" jolted the American
military, scientific, and educational establishments into a frenzy of
action. The fact that the Russians could put bombs in orbit set off the
most intensive peacetime military research program in history. When the
Soviets repeated their triumph by putting Yuri Gagarin into space, a
parallel impetus started the U.S. manned space effort on a similar
course.
In the same way that the need for ballistics calculations indirectly
triggered the invention of the general-purpose digital computer, the
aftermath of Sputnik started the development of interactive computers,
and eventually led directly to the devices now known as personal
computers. Just as von Neumann found himself in the center of
political-technological events in the ENIAC era, Licklider was drawn
into a central role in what became known as "the ARPA era."
The "space race" caused a radical shakeup in America's defense
research bureaucracy. It was decided at the highest levels that one of
the factors holding up the pace of space-related research was the old,
slow way of evaluating research proposals by submitting them for
anonymous review by knowledgeable scientists in the field (a ritual
known as "peer review" that is still the orthodox model for research
funding agencies).
The new generation of Camelot-era whiz kids from the think tanks,
universities, and industry, assembled by Secretary McNamara in the
rosier days before Vietnam, were determined to use the momentum of the
post-Sputnik scare to bring the Defense Department's science and
technology bureaucracy into the space age. Something had to be done to
streamline the process of technological progress in fields vital to the
national security. One answer was NASA, which grew from a tiny
sub-agency to a bureaucratic, scientific, and engineering force of its
own. And the Defense Department created the Advanced Research Projects
Agency, ARPA. ARPA's mandate was to find
and fund bold projects that had a chance of advancing America's
defense-related technologies by orders of magnitude -- bypassing the
peer review process by putting research administrators in direct contact
with researchers.
Because of their involvement with previous air defense projects, a
few of Licklider's friends from Lincoln, like Wesley Clark, were
involved in the changeover to the fast-moving, forward-thinking, well
funded, results-oriented ARPA way of doing things. Clark designed the
TX-0 and TX-2 computers at MIT and Lincoln. The first of these machines
became famous as the favorite tool of the "hackers" in "building 26,"
who later became the legendary core of Project MAC. The second machine
was designed expressly for advanced graphic display research.
Graphic displays were esoteric devices in 1960, known only to certain
laboratories and defense facilities. Aside from the PDP-1, almost every
computer displayed information via a teletype machine. But there was an
idea floating around Lincoln that SAGE-like displays might be adapted to
many kinds of computers, not just the big ones used to monitor air
defenses. By 1961, the psychology of graphic displays had become
something of a specialty for Licklider. Between BB&N and Lincoln, he was
spending more time with electrical engineers than with psychologists.
Through his computer-oriented colleagues, Licklider became acquainted
with Jack Ruina, director of ARPA in the early 1960s. Ruina wanted to do
something about computerizing military command and control systems on
all levels -- not just air defense -- and wanted to set up a special
office within ARPA to develop new information processing techniques.
ARPA's goal was to leapfrog over conventional research and development
by funding attempts to make fundamental breakthroughs. And Licklider's
notion of creating a new kind of computer capable of directly
interacting with human operators via a keyboard and a display screen
interface (instead of relying on batch processing or even paper-tape
input) convinced Ruina that the minority of computer researchers
Licklider was talking about might just lead to such a possible
breakthrough.
"I got Jack to see the pertinence of interactive computing, not only
to military command and control, but to the whole world of day-to-day
business," Licklider recalls. "So, in October, 1962 I moved into the
Pentagon and became the director of the Information Processing
Techniques Office." And that event, as much as any other development of
that era, marked the beginning of the age of personal computing.
The unprecedented technological revolution that began with the
post-Sputnik mobilization and reached a climax with Neil Armstrong's
first step on the moon a little more than a decade later was in a very
large part made possible by a parallel revolution in the way computers
were used. The most spectacular visual shows of the space age were
provided by the enormous rockets. The human story was concentrated on
the men in the capsules atop the rockets. But the unsung heroics that
ensured the success of the space program were conducted by men using new
kinds of computers.
Remember the crew at mission control, who burst into cheers at a
successful launch, and who looked so cool nineteen hours later when the
astronaut and the mission depended on their solutions to unexpected
glitches? When the bright young men at their computer monitors were
televised during the first launches from Cape Canaveral, the picture
America saw of their working habitat reflected the results of the
research Licklider and the presentation group had performed. After all,
the kinds of computer displays you need for NORAD (North American Air
Defense Command) aren't too different from the kind you need for NASA --
in both cases, groups of people are using computers to track the path of
multiple objects in space. NASA and ARPA shared results in the computer
field -- a kind of bureaucratic cooperation that was relatively rare in
the pre-Sputnik era.
Because the Russians appeared to be far ahead of us in the
development of huge booster rockets, it was decided that the United
States should concentrate on guidance systems and ultralight (i.e.,
ultraminiature) components for our less powerful rockets -- a policy
that was rooted in the fundamental thinking established by the ICBM
committee a few years back, in the von Neumann days.
Therefore the space program and the
missile program both required the rapid development of very small,
extremely reliable computers.
The decision of the richest, most powerful nation in history to put a
major part of its resources into the development of electronic-based
technologies happened at an exceptionally propitious moment in the
history of electronics. The basic scientific discoveries that made the
miniaturization revolution possible -- the new field of semiconductor
research that produced the transistor and then the integrated circuit --
made it clear that 1960 was just the beginning of the rapid evolution of
computers. The size, speed, cost, and energy requirements of the basic
switching elements of computers changed by orders of magnitude when
electron tubes replaced relays in the late 1940s, and again when
transistors replaced tubes in the 1950s, and now integrated circuits
were about to replace transistors in the 1960s. In the blue-sly labs,
where the engineers were almost outnumbered by the dreamers, they were
even talking about "large-scale integration."
When basic science makes
breakthroughs at such a pace, and when technological exploitation of
those discoveries is so deliberately intensified, a big problem is being
able to envision what's possible and preferable to do next.
The ability to see a long range goal, and to encourage the right
combination of boldness and pragmatism in all the subfields that could
contribute to achieving it, was the particular talent that Licklider
brought onto the scene. And with Licklider came a new generation of
designers and engineers who had their sights on something the
pre-Sputnik computer orthodoxy would have dismissed as science fiction.
Suddenly, human-computer symbiosis
wasn't an esoteric hypothesis in a technical journal, but a national
goal.
When Licklider went to ARPA, he wasn't given a laboratory, but an
office, a budget, and a mandate to raise the state of the art of
information processing. He started by supporting thirteen different
research groups around the country, primarily at MIT; System Development
Corporation (SDC); the University of California at Berkeley, Santa
Barbara, and Los Angeles; USC; Rand; Stanford Research Institute (now
SRI International); Carnagie-Mellon University; and the university of
Utah. And when his office decided to support a project, that meant
providing thirty or forty times the budget that the researchers were
accustomed to, along with access to state-of-the-art research technology
and a mandate to think big and think fast.
A broad range of new capabilities that Licklider then called
"interactive computing" was the ultimate
goal, and the first step was an exciting new concept that came to be
known as time-sharing.
Time-sharing was to be the first, most important step in the
transition from batch processing to the threshold of personal computing
(i.e., one person to one machine). The idea was to create computer
systems capable of interacting with many programmers at the same time,
instead of forcing them to wait in line with their cards or tapes.
Exploratory probes of the technologies that could make time-sharing
possible had been funded by the Office of Naval Research and Air Force
Office of Scientific Research before ARPA stepped in. Licklider beefed
up the support to the MIT Cambridge laboratory where AI researchers were
working on their own approach to "multi-access computing."
Project MAC, as
this branch became known, was the single node in the research network
where AI and computer systems design were, for a few more years,
cooperative rather than divergent.
MAC generated legends of its own, from the pioneering AI research of
McCarthy, Minsky, Papert, Fredkin, and Weizenbaum, to the weird new
breed of programmers who called themselves "hackers," who held late
night sessions of "Spacewar" with a PDP-1 they had rigged to fly
simulated rockets around an ocilloscope screen and shoot dots of light
at one another. MAC was one of the most important meeting grounds of
both the AI prodigies of the 1970s and the software designers of the
1980s. By the end of the ARPA-supported heyday, however, the AI people
and the computer systems people were no longer on the same track.
One of Licklider's first moves in 1962-1963 was to set up an MIT and
Bolt, Beranek and Newman group in Massachusetts to help Systems
Development Corporation in Santa Monica in producing a transistorized
version of the SAGE-based time-sharing prototypes, which were based on
the old vacuum tube technology. The first step was to get a machine to
all the researchers that was itself interactive enough that it could be
used to design more interactive versions -- the "bootstrapping" process
that became the deliberate policy of Licklider and his successors. The
result was that university laboratories and think tanks around the
country began to work on the components of a system that would depend on
engineering and software breakthroughs that hadn't been achieved yet.
The time-sharing experience turned
out to be a cultural as well as a technological watershed. As Licklider
had predicted, these new tools changed the way information was
processed, but they also changed the way people thought. A lot of
researchers who were to later participate in the creation of personal
computer technology got their first experience in the high-pressure art
and science of interactive computer design in the first ARPA-funded
time-sharing projects.
One of the obstacles to achieving the kind of interactive computing
that Licklider and his growing cadre of "converts" envisioned lay in the
slowness and low capacity of the memory component of 1950-style
computers; this hardware problem was solved when Jay Forrester, director
of the Whirlwind project, came up with "magnetic core memory." The
advent of transistorized computers promised even greater memory capacity
and faster access time in the near future. A different problem,
characterized by the batch-processing bottleneck, stemmed from the way
computers were set up to accept input from human operators; a
combination of hardware and software innovations were converging on
direct keyboard-to-computer input.
Another one of the obstacles to achieving the overall goal of
interactive computing lay not in the way computer processed information
-- an issue that was addressed by the time-sharing effort -- but the
primitive way computers were set up to display information to human
operators. Lincoln Laboratory was the natural place to concentrate the
graphics effort. Another graphics-focused group was started at the
University of Utah. The presentation group veterans, expanded by the
addition of experts in the infant technology of transistor-based
computer design, began to work intensively on the problem of display
devices.
Licklider remembers the first official meeting on interactive
graphics, where the first wave of preliminary research was presented and
discussed in order to plan the assault on the main problem of getting
information from the innards of the new computers to the surface of
various kinds of display screens. It was at this meeting, Licklider
recalls, that
Ivan
Sutherland first took the stage in a spectacular way.
"Sutherland was a graduate student at the time," Licklider remembers,
"and he hadn't been invited to give a paper." But because of the
graphics program he was creating for his Ph.D. thesis, because he was a
prot�g� of Claude Shannon, and because of the rumors that he was just
the kind of prodigy ARPA was seeking, he was invited to the meeting.
"Toward the end of one of the last sessions," according to Licklider,
"Sutherland stood up and asked a question of one of the speakers." It
was the kind of question that indicated that this unknown young fellow
might have something interesting to say to this high-powered assemblage.
So Licklider arranged for him to speak to the group the next day: "Of
course, he brought some slides, and when we saw them everyone in the
room recognized his work to be quite a lot better than what had been
described in the formal session." Sutherland's thesis, a program
developed on the TX-2 at Lincoln, demonstrated an innovative way to
handle computer graphics -- and a new way of commanding the operations
of computers. He called it Sketchpad, and it was clearly evident
to the assembled experts that he had leaped over their years of research
to create something that even the most ambitious of them had not yet
dared.
Sketchpad allowed a computer operator to use the computer to create,
very rapidly, sophisticated visual models on a display screen that
resembled a television set. The visual patterns could be stored in the
computer's memory like any other data, and could be manipulated by the
computer's processor. In a way, this was a dramatic answer to
Licklider's quest for a fast model-builder. But Sketchpad was much more
than a tool for creating visual displays. It was a kind of simulation
language that enabled computers to translate abstractions into
perceptually concrete forms. And it was a model for totally new ways of
operating computers; by changing something on the display screen, it was
possible, via Sketchpad, to change something in the computer's memory.
"If I had known how hard it was to do, I probably wouldn't have done
it," Alan Kay remembers Sutherland saying about his now-legendary
program. Not only was the technical theory bold, innovative, and sound,
but the program actually worked. With a
lightpen, a keyboard, a display screen, and the Sketchpad program
running on the relatively crude real-time computers available in 1962,
anyone could see for themselves that computers could be used for
something else beside data processing. And in the case of
Sketchpad, seeing was truly believing.
When he left ARPA in 1964, Licklider recommended Sutherland as the
next director of the IPTO. "I had some hesitance about recommending
someone so young," remembers Licklider, "but Bob Sproull, Ruina's
successor as ARPA director, said he had no problem with his youth if
Sutherland was really as bright as he was said to be." By that time,
Sutherland, still in his early twenties, had established a track record
for himself doing what ARPA liked best -- racing ahead of the technology
to accomplish what the orthodoxy considered impossible or failed to
consider altogether.
When Sutherland took over, the various time-sharing, graphics, AI,
operating systems, and programming language projects were getting into
full swing, and the office was growing almost as fast as the industries
that were spinning off the space-age research bonanza. Sutherland hired
Bob Taylor, a young man from the research funding arm of NASA, to be his
assistant, and ultimately his successor when he left IPTO in 1965.
Licklider went to the IBM research center in 1964, and then back to MIT
to take charge of Project MAC in 1968.
In 1983, over a quarter of a century since the spring day he decided
to observe his own daily activities, Licklider is still actively
counseling those who build information processing technologies. After
three decades of direct experience with "the rule of two," he is not
sure that information engineers have even approached the physical limits
of information storage and processing.
One thing scientists and engineers
know now that they didn't know when he and the others started, Licklider
points out, is that "Nature is very much more hospitable to information
processing than anybody had any idea of in the 1950s. We didn't realize
that molecular biologists had provided an existence proof for a
fantastically efficient, reliable, information processing mechanism --
the molecular coding of the human genetic system. The informational
equivalent of the world's entire fund of knowledge can be stored in less
than a cubic centimeter of DNA, which tells us that we haven't begun to
approach the physical limits of information processing technology."
The time-sharing communities, and the network of communities that
followed them, were part of another dream -- the prospect of computer-mediated
communities throughout the world, extending beyond the computer experts
to thinkers, artists, and business people. Licklider believes it is
entirely possible that the on-line, interactive human-computer community
he dreamed about will become technologically feasible sometime within
the next decade. He knew all along that the frameworks of ideas and the
first levels of hardware technology achieved in the 1960s and 1970s were
only the foundation for a lot of work that remained to be done.
When the bootstrapping process of building better, cheaper,
experimental interactive information processing systems intersects with
the rising curve of electronic capabilities, and the dropping curve of
computational costs, it will become possible for millions, rather than a
thousand or two, to experience the kind of information environment the
ARPA-sponsored infonauts knew.
In the early 1980s, millions of people already own personal computers
that will become obsolete when versions a hundred times as fast with a
thousand times the memory capacity come along at half of today's prices.
When tens of millions of people get their hands on powerful enough
devices, and a means for connecting them, Licklider still thinks the job
will only be in its beginning stages.
Looking toward the day when the "intergalactic network" he speculated
about in the mid sixties becomes feasible, he remains convinced that the
predicted boost in human cultural capabilities will take place, but only
after enough people use an early version of the system to think up a
more capable system that everybody can use: "With a large enough
population involved in improving the system, it will be easier for new
ideas to be born and propagated," he notes, perhaps remembering the
years when interactive computing was considered a daring venture by a
bunch of mavericks. The most significant
issue, he still believes, is whether the medium will become truly
universal.
"What proportion of the total
population will be able to join that community? That's still the
important question," Licklider concludes, still not sure whether this
new medium will remain the exclusive property of a smaller group who
might end up wielding disproportionate power over others by virtue of
their access to these tools, or whether it will become the property of
the entire culture, like literacy.
