J. C. R. Licklider

Developer of the Internet

• Born: March 11, 1915
• Birthplace: St. Louis, Missouri
• Died: June 26, 1990
• Place of death: Arlington, Massachusetts

Primary Company/Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Introduction

Sometimes known as the Johnny Appleseed of twentieth-century computing, J. C. R. Licklider has been credited by various sources as the creator of the Internet, cloud computing, libraries as repostories for information accessed electronically, and e-commerce. Licklider's accomplishments were not based on design and development of system architectures, hardware, or software. Instead, his great contribution was as a visionary, an “idea man,” who conceives concepts and then brings them to the attention of those who eventually design and implement his vision. On a more practical level, Licklider's positions in key organizations (particularly the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Bolt, Beranek, and Newman), as a leader of efforts backed by funds that he freely and judiciously applied, went far toward making his visions, including his concept of what is now the Internet, reality.

Early Life

Born on March 11, 1915, in St. Louis, Missouri, Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider was the only child of Joseph and Margaret Licklider. He earned his bachelor's degree in 1937 with three majors: physics, mathematics, and psychology. That combination of physical science, study of the mind, and mathematics would inform his thinking in coming years as he conceived of general problems and then how existing technologies might be used to solve them. Remaining at Washington University, he earned a master's degree in psychology the following year.

Five years later (in 1942), he received a doctorate in psychoacoustics from The Johns Hopkins University. He went immediately into research to support the war effort, working at Swarthmore before going to Harvard the following year. From 1943 until 1950, he worked in the Psychoacoustics Laboratory at Harvard. One of his colleagues was Leo Beranek, who would be instrumental in bringing him to Bolt, Beranek, and Newman in the late 1950s.

Licklider's specialty at this time was the study of the effects of sound as people perceive it and its effects on physiology. He remained very active in this field for several years. Even as late as 1960, the year he published his major work on the man-machine interface, he coauthored a significant article, “Suppression of Pain by Sound.” The article reported on the results of a study of the effectiveness of sound in alleviating pain of those undergoing dental procedures.

In 1950, Licklider moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In addition to teaching and research, one of his earliest activities there was helping to establish the Lincoln Laboratory. Developed originally as an organization to investigate how air defense technologies could be designed and implemented, it still exists today as a major research and development organization supporting government initiatives.

During his association with the Lincoln Laboratory, Licklider became involved the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), which was to support the command and control function of a large-scale integrated air defense system. The heart of that system was the Whirlwind computer. Unlike earlier computers, which operated in batch mode in response to a particular problem, this computer delivered information to the user at a computer station, who would then respond interactively. There were several of these computers working together, which raised the possibilities of not only what computers could do for users but also how they could be used to work together on a large scale.

Life's Work

By 1957, Licklider had enjoyed a career of some significance. His main life's work can be said to have begun when he accepted the position of vice president at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BB&N). In discussing the origins of the Internet for the Massachusetts Historical Review, Beranek described how he had convinced Licklider to give up his tenured position at MIT by offering him stock as part of his compensation, a rather unusual offer at the time. One of Licklider's earliest accomplishments was to convince BB&N to buy a computer for $30,000, an enormous investment at the time. Beranek recalls asking Licklider what he would use it for and receiving the reply that Licklider himself did not know but that the future success of the company would depend on having and using that capability. Within a short time, BB&N would receive an offer from Ken Olsen of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) to try the new model PDP-1. Eventually there would be several of those machines at BB&N.

Licklider was now working in computers, a departure from his background, in which psychology had predominated. He never abandoned that experience and academic training, however; it informed nearly everything that he was to do in the future. In 1960, he published a major paper on what he referred to as “man-computer symbiosis.” In that paper, he identified many of the characteristics that now define the experience of personal computing. This symbiosis was a close partnership between human and machine that would allow the human to ask questions and make decisions and to do so in a flexible manner (one can see the influence of working on SAGE/Whirlwind here). A promising aspect of this symbiosis was that the machines could take care of the routine tasks, leaving the human free to perform more intellectual functions. Although Licklider's ideas and work touched on the discipline now known as artificial intelligence (AI), it is important to note that he never entertained the notion that computing machines could replace human beings.

In 1962, Licklider left BB&N and joined the four-year-old Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Within this organization, which sought to encourage and manage new technologies that might be used to enhance the defense of the United States, a new department had been created, the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). There Licklider had a budget of approximately $10 million, a huge sum in the early 1960s, and used it to fund projects that included systems and application development and time-shared processing. One of the organizations that he funded was the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where Douglas Engelbart would invent and demonstrate the computer mouse a few years later.

Also in 1962, Licklider wrote a series of memoranda that culminated in a paper in which he described what he called an intergalactic network: a network of computers with multiple users having access to each computer (time sharing computer resources was a major goal at that time; the idea of multiple users, each with a personal computer, was not at that time widely foreseen). The paper was important in two ways. First, Licklider predicted the way that networks would develop into the Internet as we now know it. Second, and most important, he managed to convince his colleagues that it was an achievable goal and not only could be done but would offer significant advantages. One of the colleagues he managed to convince was Larry Roberts, who would later take the first steps toward that vision by managing the development of ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet.

In 1963, Licklider left IPTO to become director of DARPA's Behavioral Sciences and Command and Control Research. The following year, he left government service to work for IBM as manager of information sciences, systems, and applications, a position he would hold until 1968, when he returned to MIT. There, he was director of the Project on Mathematics and Computation (Project MAC), an effort to implement time-shared computing, with up to thirty individuals using a mainframe computer at the same time. He remained at MIT until 1985, when he retired.

Personal Life

During his life, Licklider received two major awards: the Franklin V. Taylor Award for Outstanding Contributions in the Field of Applied Experimental and Engineering Psychology (1966) and, along with five others, the Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service (1990). The Commonwealth Awards are designed to award human achievement on a worldwide basis in virtually any discipline. Others who received the award that year included Jerome Robbins and Aharon Appelfeld.

Licklider was married to Louise Carpenter Licklider; the couple had three children and two grandchildren. Despite his religious upbringing (his father was a minister), Licklider did not practice any religion. After retiring from MIT in 1985, he died five years later of complications from asthma. He was sixty-five years old.

Bibliography

Arif, Mohammed. “Where Did Cloud Computing Come from and Where Is it heading” Computer Weekly 7 Apr. 2009. Print. A discussion of the cloud and its origins, giving credit to Licklider for his ideas, eventually developed by others.

Belfiore, Michael P. The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs. New York: Harper, 2009. Print. An overview of the history, projects, and applications of DARPA.

Beranek, Leo. “Roots of the Internet: A Personal History.” Massachusetts Historical Review 2 (2000): 55–75. Print. A very personal view of the early projects and activities that gave rise to the Internet. Beranek provides a great deal of detail about the role of BB&N at the time, with particular emphasis on the role of Licklider.

Licklider, J. C. R. Libraries of the Future. Reprint. Cambridge: MIT, 1971. Print. An important study by Licklider, performed at BB&N from 1961 to 1963 as part of a project commissioned to BB&N by the Council of Library Resources. He discusses how computers can be used in libraries in the year 2000, predicting that libraries will no longer be based on books but instead on accessing knowledge by using computers.

---. “Man-Computer Symbiosis.” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics HFE-1 (1960): 4–11. Print. An important paper by Licklider in which he works out how humans and machines can operate together. Although this paper has some implications for artificial intelligence, Licklider saw computing as a tool and not a replacement for human thought.

Stefik, Mark, ed. Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths, and Metaphors. Cambridge: MIT, 1996. Print. A discussion of the functions and roles performed by the Internet, nearly all of which Licklider foresaw and wrote about.

Waldrop, M. Mitchell. The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal. New York: Viking, 2001. Print. A view of Licklider and his role in the development of advanced computing. While Licklider was probably the least flamboyant of the group that eventually laid the foundation for the Internet, Waldrop makes a good case for Licklider's being perhaps the most essential.