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Innovators
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J. C. R. Licklider
J. C. R. Licklider (1915-1990) was a psychologist
interested in how humans interact with machines
and in how humans could use machines to interact
with each other. After working on the SAGE air
defense project, he went on to work at ARPA, the
Department of Defense's Advanced Research
Projects Agency. There, "Lick" promoted the
development of interactive computing and
encouraged people to think of computers as tools for
communication and collaboration.
Transcript:
Specialized hardware facilities tend to be expensive
but very efficient. If there isn't any way to distribute
their use to make it available all over the country or all
over the world, it may be economically impractical to
provide them because there isn't a large enough need
for them in any one place. On the other hand, if they
can be distributed then specialized hardware facilities
can be very effective and can let us do things that we
couldn't otherwise do.
The thing that makes a computer communications
network special is that it puts the workers, either team
members who are geographically distributed, in touch
not only with one another but with the information
base with which they work all the time. So that when
they get to developing plans, the blueprints as it were,
don't have to be copied and sent all around the
country, the blueprints come out of the database and
appear on everybody's scopes. And the correlation
the coordination of the activity is essentially right there
in the computer network itself. This is obviously going
to make a tremendous difference in how we plan,
organize, and execute almost everything with any
intellectual consequence. Well, it's been hard to share information for years.
The printing press of course, was the great step in to
sharing information. But the printing press didn't
essentially handle the problem of distributing it, it
handled the problem of copying it. And we have been
needing for a long time some better way to distribute
information and to carry it about. The print on paper
forum is embarrassing because in order to distribute it
you've got to move the paper around, and lots of
paper gets to be bulky and heavy and expensive to
move about. |
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