From: Paul Fernhout <pdfernhout@kurtz-fernhout.com>
Technology Review http://www.techreview.com/
(January/February 2000 Issue Vol 103 No. 1 Pg. 66)
has an interesting article entitled "Computing's Johnny Appleseed"
on J.C.R. Licklider. It discusses his interest in "Man-Machine
Symbiosis" and how that relates to his stint at DARPA providing funding
for people including Doug Engelbart. The article provides an interesting
perspective on the early history of computing.
It is available online here:
http://www.techreview.com/articles/jan00/waldrop.htm
There is a long list of the people and labs "Lick" directed money to
around 1962, including all the big computer science names today --
Stanford, Berkley, MIT, CMU . One part reads: "Lick had also taken a
chance on a soft-spoken visionary he barely knew - Douglas Engelbart of
SRI International - whose ideas on augmenting the human intellect with
computers closely resembled his own and who had been thoroughly ignored
by his colleagues. With funding from Lick and eventually from NASA as
well, Engelbart would go on to develop the mouse, hypertext, on-screen
windows, and many other features of modern software."
I found particularly interesting the discussion of Lick's work in the
1950s on "SAGE", a real-time computing system for air defense, and how
it reflected the first major experience of how humans and machines
could work together.
A related link which includes a paper by Lick:
http://memex.org/licklider.html
-Paul Fernhout
Kurtz-Fernhout Software
=========================================================
Developers of custom software and educational simulations
Creators of the Garden with Insight(TM) garden simulator
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com
P.S. There's so much good stuff on the list and lectures I've fallen
way behind!
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