| Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 11, 1915 St. Louis, Missouri, USA |
| Died | June 26, 1990 (aged 75) Arlington, Massachusetts |
| Nationality | American |
| Other names | J.C.R Lick "Computing's Johnny Appleseed" |
| Education | Washington University in St. Louis University of Rochester |
| Known for | Cybernetics/Interactive computing "Intergalactic Computer Network" (Internet) Artificial Intelligence |
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. He is particularly remembered for being one of the first to forsee modern-style interactive computing, and its application to all manner of activities; and also as an Internet pioneer, with an early vision of a world-wide computer network long before it was built. He did much to actually initiate all that through his funding of research which led to a great deal of it, including today's canonical graphical user interface, and the ARPANET, the direct predecessor to the Internet.
He has been called "computing's Johnny Appleseed", for having planted the seeds of computing in the digital age. Robert Taylor, founder of Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory and Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center, noted that "most of the significant advances in computer technology—including the work that my group did at Xerox PARC—were simply extrapolations of Lick's vision. They were not really new visions of their own. So he was really the father of it all."[2]
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Licklider was born March 11, 1915, in St. Louis, Missouri, USA.[3] He was the only child of Joseph Parron Licklider, a Baptist minister, and Margaret Robnett Licklider.[4] He displayed early engineering talent, building model airplanes. He carried on with his hobby of refurbishing automobiles throughout his life.
He studied at Washington University in St. Louis, where he received a BA in 1937, majoring in physics, mathematics and psychology, and an MA in psychology in 1938. He received a PhD 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 program for engineering students.
In 1957 he received the Franklin V. Taylor Award from the Society of Engineering Psychologists. In 1958, he was elected President of the Acoustical Society of America, and in 1990 he received the Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service.[5]
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.
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.
In 1963, he was named Director of Behavioral Sciences Command & Control Research at ARPA. In April of that year, he sent a memo to his colleagues in which he outlined the early challenges presented in trying to establish a time-sharing network of computers with the software of the era.[6] Ultimately, his vision led to ARPANet, the precursor of today's Internet.
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 provided inspiration for some elements of the Unix operating system developed at Bell Labs by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie in 1970.
He retired and became Professor Emeritus in 1985. He died in 1990 in Arlington, Massachusetts.[5]
In the psychoacoustics field, Licklider is most remembered for his 1951 "Duplex Theory of Pitch Perception," presented in a paper[7] that has been cited hundreds of times,[8] was reprinted in a 1979 book,[9] and formed the basis for modern models of pitch perception.[10]
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.
Licklider 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.
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 where the computer mouse was invented.
During his two-year term of office at IPTO, 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, UC Berkeley, and the System Development Corporation.
Licklider played a similar role in conceiving of and funding early networking research, most notably the ARPAnet. He formulated the earliest ideas of a global computer network in August 1962 at BBN, in a series of memos discussing the "Intergalactic Computer Network" concept. These ideas contained almost everything that the Internet is today.
While at IPTO, he would then convince Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and Lawrence G. Roberts that an all-encompassing computer network was a very important concept.
His paper The Computer as a Communication Device, Science and Technology, April 1968, illustrates his vision of network applications, and predicts the use of computer networks to support communities of common interest and collaboration without regard to location.
Licklider submitted the paper Televistas: Looking ahead through side windows to the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television in 1967. In this paper, he describes a radical departure from the "broadcast" model of television. Instead, he advocates a two-way communications network. The Carnegie Commission led to the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Although the Carnegie Commission's report explains that "Dr. Licklider's paper was completed after the Commission had formulated its own conclusions," President Johnson said at the signing of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967] "So I think we must consider new ways to build a great network for knowledge-not just a broadcast system, but one that employs every means of sending and of storing information that the individual can use."[11]
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 artificial intelligence (AI).[12] 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 has written several articles and books:
Articles, a selection: