Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (
March 11, 1915 – June 26, 1990), known simply as J.C.R. or "Lick" was an
American computer scientist, considered one of the most important figures in
computer science and general
computing history. After early work in
psychoacoustics, he became interested in
information technology early in his career. Much like
Vannevar Bush, J.C.R. Licklider's contribution to the development of the
Internet consists of ideas, not inventions. He foresaw the need for networked
computers with easy user interfaces. His ideas foretold of graphical computing, point-and-click interfaces, digital libraries, e-commerce, online banking, and software that would exist on a network and migrate wherever it was needed. He has been called "computing's
Johnny Appleseed" for having planted the seeds of computing in the digital age.
Licklider was instrumental in conceiving, funding and managing the research that led to modern personal computers and the Internet. His seminal paper on
Man-Computer Symbiosis foreshadowed interactive computing, and he went on to fund early efforts in time-sharing and application development, most notably the work of
Douglas Engelbart, who founded the
Augmentation Research Center at
Stanford Research Institute and created the famous
On-Line System. He played a similar role in conceiving of and funding early networking research, most notably the
ARPAnet. His 1968 paper on
The Computer as a Communication Device predicts the use of computer networks to support communities of common interest and collaboration without regard to location.
Licklider was born in
St. Louis, Missouri, USA. He was the
only child of an insurance salesman and his wife. He displayed early engineering talent, building
model airplanes. He carried on with his hobby of refurbishing automobiles throughout his life.
He studied at
Washington University in St. Louis, where he received a BA in 1937, majoring in physics, math and psychology, and an MA in psychology in 1938. He received a
PhD in
psychoacoustics from the
University of Rochester in 1942, and worked at the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory at
Harvard University from 1943 to 1950. He became interested in
information technology, and moved to
MIT in 1950 as an associate professor, where he served on a committee that established
MIT Lincoln Laboratory and established a psychology programme for engineering students. He worked on a
Cold War project known as
Semi Automatic Ground Environment (better known by its
acronym "SAGE"), designed to create a computer-aided air defense system. The SAGE system included computers that collected and presented data to a human operator, who then chose the appropriate response. In 1957, he became a Vice President at
Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc., where he bought the first production
PDP-1 computer and conducted the first public demonstration of
time-sharing. He was elected president of the
Acoustical Society of America in 1958.
In 1960, Licklider wrote his famous paper
Man-Computer Symbiosis, which outlined the need for simpler interaction between computers and computer users. Licklider has been credited as an early pioneer of
cybernetics and
artificial intelligence (AI).
http://www.thocp.net/biographies/licklidder_jcr.html Unlike many AI practitioners, Licklider never felt that men would be replaced by computer-based beings. As he wrote in that article: "Men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking."
Licklider formulated the earliest ideas of a global computer network in August 1962 at BBN, in a series of memos discussing the "
Galactic Network" concept. These ideas contained almost everything that the Internet is today. His paper
The Computer as a Communication Device, Science and Technology, April 1968, illustrates his vision of network applications.
In October 1962, Licklider was appointed head of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at
ARPA, the
United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He would then convince
Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and
Lawrence G. Roberts that an all-encompassing computer network was a very important concept. During his two-year term of office, he granted funding to develop
Project MAC at MIT, a large
mainframe computer that was designed to be shared by up to 30 simultaneous users, each sitting at a separate
typewriter terminal. He also granted funding to similar projects at
Stanford University, UCLA, UC Berkeley, and the
System Development Corporation, all in
California, and to the
Augmentation Research Center at the
Stanford Research Institute, headed by
Douglas Englebart, which later invented the
computer mouse.
In 1968, J.C.R. Licklider became director of
Project MAC at MIT, and a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering. Project MAC had produced the first computer time-sharing system,
CTSS, and one of the first
online setups with the development of
Multics (work on which commenced in 1964). Multics was the direct ancestor of the
Unix operating system developed at
Bell Labs by
Ken Thompson and
Dennis Ritchie in 1970.
He retired and became a professor
emeritus in 1985. He died in
Arlington, Massachusetts. 
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