[ih] J.C.R. Licklider

[Miles Fidelman]

How can "Internet Historians" not be acquainted with Lick?!!!

I met him when he had retired from ARPA and was running the Dynamic Modeling group at MIT.  We had some great chats in the break room at 545 Tech Square - though I never learned about his role in the Internet until much later.

Ironically, it was his son Tracy, as President of the old Boston Computer Society, who materialized the initial funding for our Center for Civic Networking.

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________________________________
From: Internet-history <internet-history-bounces at elists.isoc.org> on behalf of Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
Sent: Saturday, 31 October 2026 22:50:01
To: Internet-history at elists.isoc.org <Internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
Subject: [ih] J.C.R. Licklider

Speaking of Internet History, the ARPANET et al --- There's another
player from the early days of The Internet that may not be well known to
Internet historians - J.C.R. Licklider

 From 1970 through 1977, I was in Licklider's group at MIT, first as a
student and then as a member of his research staff.   Sometime in the
early 1960s, Lick (as everyone called him then) wrote several papers
describing his vision of a "intergalactic network" of computers, all
somehow able to communicate with each other, and working together to
help humans "do everything humans do."   His vision included the notion
that everyone would have some kind of "personal" computer that would
interact with other computers even when the human was doing something else.

Of course, in 1975 a "personal computer" was an account on some large
timeshared machine, and the human interacted with it only when s/he was
"logged in" at some kind of terminal.  Today, humans have computers in
their pockets much more powerful than the 1970s machines, and able to
interact with huge numbers of other computers using this thing we call
The Internet.   As AI and its "agents" emerge, we may be getting very
close to Lick's vision of vast numbers of interacting computers helping
humans do everything humans do.

During the 1970s, I was thoroughly indoctrinated into Lick's
"intergalactic network" vision of how computers would be integrated into
society.   In retrospect, I've realized that I spent my entire career
somehow involved in building Lick's vision, as part of the huge
community that made it happen.  It's been a wild ride and there's still
a question of whether we'll see a utopian future or one where AI kills
us all.

For anyone interested in the history of the Internet, I highly recommend
a book by Mitchell Waldrop, called "The Dream Machine". It is
essentially a biography of Lick, but also describes much of the
1960-1990 history of computing.  Among the details you may not know:

- Lick's training was in psychology and psychoacoustics, not computer
science.
- The Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) of ARPA was formed
to explore use of computers.  Lick was the first Director of IPTO, and
the ARPANET was a means of starting work on his vision;
- Prior to joining ARPA, Lick worked at BBN, and lobbied for the
company's first computer purchase.  It was necessary to process data
associated with the study of acoustics; later, ARPA awarded the ARPANET
contract to BBN;  Connection?
- Lick was very much a "do it" person, preferring functioning systems
over theory;  he described what we now call "agents", but he called them
Olivers
- Lick's vision was continued after he retired by his "chief of staff"
at MIT, Al Vezza, who convinced Tim Berners-Lee to come to MIT and lead
the W3C from there.  This happened too late to be covered in Waldrop's
book.  The Web was an important component of Lick's vision and W3C was a
means to drive its evolution.  Al used to be my boss and he contacted me
to get Oracle to join W3C as a Founding Member and I served as the
corporate representative.

There were a lot of people involved in the early years of what is now
The Internet, and this book describes a lot of the interactions and
behind the scenes activity that was involved.  Again, I highly recommend
it.  I found that the parts of the book that describe things that
happened while I was "in the room" are quite accurate and often explain
the "why" of things I remember happening but never knew the full story.

/Jack Haverty