The man who made it happen!
If you ever had the chance to meet him, he would insist on being called Lick. Granted, it is an unusual nickname to insist upon, but then again, there was nothing usual about this young lad from St Louis, Missouri. With his thick Missouri accent, to a passive observer he sounded like a hillbilly. However, as Bill McGill, a former colleague once recalled, "if you were working on the same problem, and listened to his formulation, listening to him would be like seeing the glow of dawn."1
Lick detested the idea of paperwork, and bureaucracy, but, in 1962, in his late 40s, he agreed to go to Washington. You know why? Well, to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., he had a dream! Once at the helm, it was time to set the wheels in motion. Part one of the task was assembling a team, and holy macaroni! Did he assemble one! The likes of which the world had never quite seen. In fact, many of them would go on to become the pioneers of a tomorrow which is our present, and trite as the phrase is, there's perhaps no other way to put it; in making it all happen, Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider ended up changing the world!
But all of this was to take place much, much later, so let’s begin at beginning, shall we? Born in 1915, as a kid Lick loved building model airplanes, and no one quite built them like he did. As he grew older, his desire to figure out the inner workings of any and every machine would have him take apart his own car to see how it worked. This fascination resulted in him never paying more than 50 dollars for a car (which even back then, was nuts an amount, peanuts I meant) because, ‘whatever shape it was in, he could fix it up and make it go.’2
By the time he got to college, he wanted to learn just about everything. Anytime someone waxed poetic about a subject, he would want to pursue that and as a result, he ended up switching his major’ multiple times— from Chemistry to Physics, and then onto Fine Arts. By the time he was done with college in 1937, 22 years young, he had earned himself a bachelor’s degree with a triple major in Physics, Mathematics and Psychology.
However, it was Psychology that would have a sway on him like none other. Brain was the ultimate machine and he couldn't wait to get to work on unraveling the mysteries of its inner workings. Lick would go on to specialize in physiological psychology. More specifically, in psychoacoustics— the study of sound perception and the auditory nervous system.
1942, he got roped in to work at Harvard’s Psycho-Acoustic Lab to assist with US' war efforts. The task at hand was to make it less dangerous for bomber pilots to fly their planes. But how exactly, you might ask? Well, high up at altitudes of over 35,000 ft, it wasn't particularly easy to hear commands over the radio, especially with all that noise from the engines in cockpits that weren't even pressurized. Lick and his team’s job was to study the physiological and psychological underpinnings of the processes involved in sound perception and help with that.
But, as they say, the past is a different country! Today, no one would be looked down upon for pursuing neuroscience. However, back then, choosing psychology seemed like an odd choice for someone of his brilliance. Even in the post-war years, psychology was still a relatively young discipline, and it wasn't built upon the same rigorous footing as that of the 'harder sciences'. Fortunately, Lick wasn't just any old psychologist. For one, he didn't give a flying squirrel about the existing dogma or convention, be it in psychology or elsewhere. Here's what a colleague of his at Harvard had to say: "We found that talking with Lick was rather like talking with a very smart electrical engineer who knew more about your work than you did, but who also had the advantage on you because he knew all the engineering techniques, too. You have to realize that back then these ideas were mind-boggling in psychology", said Bill McGill. "They were right on the cutting edge. They were far more complex and sophisticated than standard psychological learning theory. What Lick was doing came out of systems engineering, the construction of servomechanisms, the construction of equipment for human operators in advanced aircraft."3
Feb, 1950, Lick moved to MIT from his non-tenured position at Harvard and eventually got to work at a recently minted facility at MIT called the Lincoln lab, a research wing dedicated to the United States air defense. The military establishment impressed with his past work asked him to co-direct Project Lincoln's radar-display development group. One of the objectives of this group was to study how humans and machines worked together as a system. It was here that Lick would go on to put together a dream team, a feat that he would repeat once more many years later. He was in charge of the human factors group and hand-picked "one of the best groups of psychologists there ever was,"4 a group which consisted of folks like George Miller and Bill McGill. However, only a few years later, his dream of setting up a department of psychology based on the rigor of 'hard sciences' at MIT would die a death bureaucratic hurdles. Some of these same folks, especially Miller would go on to contribute to the birth of whole a new discipline called cognitive psychology, which despite Lick's best efforts, did not happen at MIT.
The falling apart of his team seemed like the end of a big chapter which left Lick quite disappointed. But fortunately for us, things would change. 1956, a chance encounter with a young and rather opinionated physicist who also worked at Lincoln lab would alter the shape of Lick's future and in a way, ours as well!
Wesley Clark's office happened to be at one end of a long basement hallway at MIT. One fine day, on his way back from the stockroom, he would recall years later, "I wandered in and back through a little labyrinth of baffles and barriers, off to one side was this very dark laboratory and I went in, and after probing around in the dark for a while I found this man sitting in front of some displays. He was doing some kind of psychometrics, and he was clearly an interesting fellow. I got interested in what he was doing and, in his apparatus, and as I recall I suggested to him that he could achieve the same results by using a COMPUTER!"5 And ever since the encounter, Lick was hooked! He eventually learned how to program, and a series of events would transpire, making this world-class psychologist, leave behind the field he had worked in for over 20 years to go off on a completely different tangent.
In 1960, he published a paper titled "Man-Computer Symbiosis"6, which would set the general direction of computer research for decades to come. Now, if you are wondering how the heck did that happen, in that, dear reader, you are not alone!
Here are the words of Robert Rubin, a former student at MIT who had taken his course in experimental psychology: “For the life of me, I could not imagine how a psychologist who, in 1956, had no apparent knowledge of computers, could have written such a profound and insightful paper about ‘my field’ in 1960” “Lick’s paper made a deep impression on me and refined my own realization that a new age of computing was upon us.”7
1962, Jack Ruina, the third-ever director of a recently established agency of the Department of Defense called Advanced Research Projects Agency or ARPA, was looking for someone to head their command-and-control/computing program. As luck would have it, they were also looking for someone to head their behavioral-science program. Eventually, Lick's name was suggested for the top job. "Behavior and computing!? What kind of combination was that? It seemed strange."8 recalled Ruina.
And thus, the stage was set! He had the dream, articulated in the now seminal "Man Computer Symbiosis". Time sharing, interactive computing, computer graphics, artificial intelligence, computers as devices for communication— these were the must-haves of the computing revolution Lick wanted to unleash. They had to become the future. Determined, Lick set about doing what he did best. He assembled a team; a group, the likes of which the world had never seen. He fostered a community.
One has to admit that the sheer enormity of the intellectual prowess he tried to harness and bring together under one roof is simply staggering. Just to offer you a glimpse of what the heck are we going on and on about, here are a few names from the list of Lick's inner circle and who they were:
John McCarthy: The man who coined the term "artificial intelligence," one of the founders of the discipline; the creator of the programming language LISP, who also happened to have invented a process of automatic memory management called Garbage collection.
Fernando Corbató: A pioneer of time-sharing operating systems and the man who invented the world's first computer password.
Ed Fredkin: Richard Feynman, one of the finest physicists of his generation, himself had this to say about Fredkin: "If anyone is going to come up with a new and fruitful way of looking at physics, Fredkin will."9 Fredkin's primary contribution to the field of computing includes his work on fascinating models of computing such as reversible computing which if made possible and the operative word being ‘if’— would lead to computers with no energy costs!
Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, Clifford Shaw: These three men co- wrote the world's first artificial intelligence program called The Logic Theorist. The program would prove 38 of the first 52 theorems from Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, a seminal text written in defense of the idea of logic itself.
Douglas Engelbart: The man who gave us the mother of all tech demonstrations!
Also, famously, when Engelbart, who was based out of Stanford (which back in 1961 was the "outer boondocks of computing") submitted his proposal for funding, no other funding agency wanted to touch his proposal with a ten-foot pole! But Lick approached it differently. “Lick was the first person to believe in me" said Engelbart. "And he was the first person to stick his neck out and give me a chance. In fact, if he hadn't done that, if he hadn't stuck his neck out and given me money, I don't think anybody ever would have done so.”10
Quite the dream team he had built, but it does not end there. April 25, 1963, he shot off a memo to his all-stars team while in a rush to get on a plane. A few years later, this very memo sent to the team at ARPA "would become the direct inspiration for the ARPANET, which would eventually evolve into today's Internet."11 The friggin INTERNET!
Lick would eventually step down from his position as the director of ARPA in 1964. Despite his accomplishments, which people would wax lyrical about for years to come, he remained humble to a fault. This is what he had to say about his time at ARPA: "I think maybe the best thing I did was to pick my successor. Ivan was surely more brilliant than I, and very effective. He carried it on."12
Lick was 49 years old when he stepped down as the director, while Ivan was only 26 and was a first lieutenant in the army. If this appointment were to come true, Ivan would have to hire a deputy, a colonel who would outrank him by miles. As to why that was a problem? It’s because there are very few places in the world which are more rank-conscious than the military establishment which resides within the perimeter of the world’s largest office building, the Pentagon. But, it was Lick's decision to make and he backed his choice to the hilt. "So, what if [he] was young? Ivan was a true believer in the things I was a believer in," Lick explained, "and, in my view, he was better at [them]."13 Ivan Sutherland would succeed Licklider at ARPA, and today he is considered as the father of computer graphics.
Years went by and Lick continued to contribute. Robert Taylor who oversaw the creation of ARPANET, the precursor to the internet, spoke about Lick’s vision "[He] had a vision of a better way of computing. Once upon a time, to get a computer to do your bidding, you had to punch holes in paper cards or tapes, give the paper to someone who fed it to the machine, and then go away for hours or days. Lick believed we could do better and, more than any other single individual, saw to it that we did. [But] the least known of Lick’s accomplishments is perhaps his most significant. Prior to his work at ARPA, no U.S. university granted a Ph.D. in computer science. Lick’s ARPA program set the precedent for providing the research base at four of the first universities to establish graduate programs in computer science: U.C. Berkeley, CMU, MIT, and Stanford. He laid the foundation for graduate education in the newly created field of computer science.”14
Today, he is referred to as the Johnny Appleseed of Computing, but for us he is hands down the Nick Fury of the nerdvana of computing! You know why? Well, because if you think about it, he did ask them to assemble, now, didn't he?
Waldrop, M.M. (2002). The Dream Machine: J.C.R.Licklider and the Revolution that Made Computing Personal. Viking