BOOK
The Gist: Inside Story Of The "sugar-daddy Impresario" Of The Network Age
$29.95
He was "like an overgrown kid." He loved bull sessions, and "his eyes always twinkled when he talked about ideas." He was "Lick," J. C. R. Licklider, the MIT psychologist turned adventurer whose career forms the spine of M. Mitchell Waldrop's saga about the creation of the first PC.
The evolution of the computer from calculator to personal tool started in the '40s - the analog '40s - with Vannevar Bush's now famous Atlantic Monthly article, "As We May Think." That essay gave voice to the idea that machines might actually help process words and insights. By the end of the '50s, and through the '60s, the then-radical concept of the computer as more than a manipulator of digits began to emerge. Wiener, Shannon, Turing, McCarthy, and Minsky told us that the computer could control things, could deal in abstractions, and might one day even think.
Yet Lick insisted that computers had to connect to people on people's terms, not the machines'. The interface had to be intuitive. Expressed most vividly in his 1960 paper "Man-Computer Symbiosis," Lick's visions seem boringly familiar today: personal computers, graphical interfaces, voice interaction, the Internet (he called it the Intergalactic Computer Network), online reference sources, and what we now call intelligent agents.
But the computer world - an increasingly vital part of the economy - was following a steady and productive route. Operators entered arcane codes and the machines spit out reams of useful data-filled pages. It was the start of the information age, and the mainstream just didn't get it. In the '70s, the CEO of DEC was famously quoted as asking, "Why would anyone want a computer on his desktop?"
So the job of developing the Dream Machine of this book's title fell to the mavericks, the outsiders, the rebels. The dreamers were at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, UCBerkeley, RAND, BBN, SRI, and Xerox PARC. And the impresario, the sugar-daddy funder, the counselor, protector, and cheerleader of this rebel band was Licklider, by then at the Department of Defense. The military's information-handling needs were not that different from civilians', so, under the well-funded umbrella of "national security needs," Lick orchestrated his human-computer symbiosis. The story is fascinating, played out in almost 500 pages of engrossing politics, personalities, and passions. This is not a casual read - but for those who want the whole story, well told, it is a very good one.
Viking: www.penguinputnam.com.
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