J. C. R. Licklider

Licklider came to computers through the ear. The only child of a Baptist minister in St. Louis, he took a triple major in physics, mathematics and psychology at Washington University in 1937, then a doctorate in psychoacoustics from Rochester in 1942 on frequency localization in the auditory cortex of a cat. Harvard's Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory kept him until 1950. At MIT he published a duplex theory of pitch perception that still underpins how researchers model hearing, and he ran the human factors team on SAGE, the air defense system where a human operator watched a screen and decided what to do about what was on it. In 1957 he left for Bolt Beranek and Newman. Everybody called him Lick.

In March 1960 he published Man-Computer Symbiosis in a journal of human factors engineering. A computer at the time was a machine you handed punched cards to and came back to the next day for the answer. Licklider argued that this had the relationship backwards, and that people and machines should work together in the same minute, the human setting the goals and framing the questions while the machine did the routine labor of getting to them. In October 1962 ARPA made him the first director of its Information Processing Techniques Office and handed him a budget.

He spent it on people rather than on proposals. Project MAC at MIT got a mainframe meant to serve 30 users at once through separate terminals. Project Genie went to Berkeley, more went to Stanford and UCLA, and Douglas Engelbart got the lab at Stanford Research Institute that produced the mouse. Licklider addressed his memos to the Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network, which was a joke about the recipients and a specification for what he wanted them to become. That circle of grantees is the circle that built the ARPANET. He left the office in July 1964 and had been gone five years when the first node came up in 1969. He did not build it. It is very hard to argue it would exist without him.

The 1968 paper he wrote with Robert Taylor, The Computer as a Communication Device, opens by stating that in a few years people will communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face, and goes on to describe online communities organized by shared interest instead of by geography. It reads less like a forecast than like a description filed early. He returned to MIT that same year, ran Project MAC until 1971, took a second turn at ARPA in 1974 and 1975, helped found the game company Infocom in 1979, and retired in 1985. He died in Arlington, Massachusetts on June 26, 1990. Outside computing, almost nobody knows the name.

J. C. R. Licklider's life against the full span of the corpus.

• A Duplex Theory of Pitch Perception article
  Still the basis of modern models of how the brain hears pitch 1951
• Man-Computer Symbiosis article
  The argument for people and machines working in the same minute 1960
• Memorandum for Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network article
  April 23, 1963 — an ARPA memo to the grantees who became the ARPANET 1963
• Libraries of the Future other
  His only book — what a library becomes once it is a machine 1965
• Televistas: Looking ahead through side windows article
  For the Carnegie Commission — two-way networks instead of broadcast 1967
• The Computer as a Communication Device article
  With Robert Taylor — online communities, described before there were any 1968

• 1937 aged ~22 Graduates from Washington University with a triple major in physics, mathematics and psychology
• 1942 aged ~27 Takes a doctorate in psychoacoustics at the University of Rochester The thesis mapped frequency localization in the auditory cortex of a cat.
• 1950 aged ~35 Moves to MIT and takes charge of human factors on the SAGE air defense project An operator read a screen and chose the response. It convinced him the interface was the problem.
• 1957 aged ~42 Leaves MIT to become a vice president at Bolt Beranek and Newman He built the BBN time-sharing system there and gave the first public demonstration of time-sharing.
• March 1960 aged 44 Publishes Man-Computer Symbiosis Written when a computer was something you fed punched cards and returned to the next day.
• October 1962 aged 47 Becomes the first director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office
• April 23, 1963 aged 48 Addresses an ARPA memo to the Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network The joke name for his grantees. They built the ARPANET.
• April 1968 aged 53 Publishes The Computer as a Communication Device with Robert Taylor
• June 26, 1990 aged 75 Dies in Arlington, Massachusetts His ashes are at Mount Auburn Cemetery. The ARPANET was 21 years old.

• Douglas Engelbart 1925–2013
  Engineer who invented the computer mouse and demonstrated interactive computing in 1968. funded
• Vannevar Bush 1890–1974
  Built the differential analyzer and directed U.S. wartime research while proposing the Memex concept. influenced by
• Vint Cerf b. 1943
  Co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols that form the foundation of the internet. influenced
• Marvin Minsky 1927–2016
  Built the first neural network learning machine, then wrote the book blamed for burying the idea. funded
• Claude Shannon 1916–2001
  Mathematician and engineer who founded information theory, the basis of all digital communication. contemporary