Licklider

Licklider was born in St. Louis and later attended Washington University where he received three bachelors’ degrees in math, physics, and psychology. He did his doctoral work in psychoacoustics and in 1942, he went to work at Harvard's Psychoacoustics Laboratory where he worked with the Air Force to find solutions for the communication problems faced

In 1962, J.C.R. Licklider was given a chance to prove his ideas when Jack Ruina asked Licklider to head up two Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) departments: Command Control and Behavioral Sciences. The Air Force gave him a large computer, a Q-32, and it was one of his main objectives to find uses other than numerical calculations.

"Throughout the period I examined, in short, my "thinking" time was devoted mainly to activities that were essentially clerical or mechanical: searching, calculating, plotting, transforming, determining the logical or dynamic consequences of a set of assumptions or hypotheses, preparing the way for a decision or an insight. Moreover, my choices of what to attempt and what not to attempt were determined to an embarrassingly great extent by considerations of clerical feasibility, not intellectual capability."

These Universities at the time used different computer systems and their physical locations made it hard to share ideas. Licklider, in 1963, sought to standardize these universities with like equipment so that researchers could build off of each other’s work and share ideas more freely. Licklider proposed the very idea of a computer network, where computers could be linked together throughout large physical distances but still communicate with each other.

Some topics in this essay:
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