It's time.
Let's go back in time to a computer history conference in 1986.
"I would like to get started with the afternoon session..."
So this guy, this guy right here—he is not just a guy, he is legendary programmer Alan
Perlis. He is so foundational that people have called him the first computer scientist.
But we are not talking about him today, because he is just
the hype man for the subject of this video. "What was needed was a galvanizing action,
and I now introduce that galvanizing action..." I want to share this person's big ideas and the
way he used those ideas to change the world. This was the first prophet of the internet and
he actually kind of made it happen. "JCR Licklider."
"Thank you Alan." I am going to 3d scan my head
during the course of this video. I'll be using this app called Polycam.
It's pretty good at doing this sort of thing, and i'll be doing a photogrammetry scan. Before
I start, this relates because, among other things, JCR Licklider was the author of a 1960 paper
called "Man Computer Symbiosis" - a groundbreaking paper that envisioned all of computing.
But let's start at the beginning. This is one of those videos that is
basically a book report, and the book in this case is The Dream Machine:
a marvelously in-depth book about basically all of early computing, but focused on JCR Licklider.
This is a crazy book. It is super long, super in-depth and a fascinating
intellectual history of the caveman days of computing. I've got a link in the description.
JCR Licklider got his start in psychoacoustics. It's basically about how people hear,
as shown in this paper, which i'm not going to pretend to understand.
What's as important as that work though is that he was doing it in Cambridge,
Massachusetts at MIT and then Harvard. There was no Silicon Valley Culture
in the 1940s — this was the place to be and he was right in the middle of it.
"There was prominent intellectual ferment during Cambridge after World War II."
So anyway, Lick — I should just get this out of the way here. I'm gonna be calling him
Lick for the rest of the video. Uh, basically everybody in his life called him Lick. We're
talking 1950s here, things were different, so yeah, that's what i'm going to be calling him too.
"How many Licks does it take to get to the center of a revolution in information technology?"
"Uh, one." So Lick is this intellectually ravenous
guy — he is super curious about everything. One summer, just for fun, he and his wife
conducted a study on the hoarding behavior of rats, because you know why not?
Thursdays, it's always so hard to find something to do.
But Lick also starts centering on a bigger and very relevant question: "why don't we
really develop an interactive computing?" So i actually kind of under-click-baited
you in this video. Lick wasn't just a person who was fundamental to the founding of the internet,
he was also fundamental to the creation of all computers, period.
He started fiddling with computers like the TX2, which ended up getting pretty advanced.
Around the same time you had the Sputnik freak-out in which, due to the Sputnik
satellite, the US worried that the USSR was getting way ahead of them in science.
"So tonight I shall concentrate on the most immediate aspects of this question
of the relationship of science to the defenses of our country."
As a result of all that, the US Department of Defense launched ARPA, later known as DARPA,
to up the science capacity in the United States. A ton of money pours in to R&D. Meanwhile,
Lick writes "Man Computer Symbiosis"— that very important paper that argues computers aren't just
distant calculating machines, they are things that we need to figure out how to interact with.
At the time, a computer wasn't, like, a thing that you worked on.
It was more a thing that you sent jobs to and then waited for those jobs to come back.
Imagine taking your ideas to the dry cleaner. Lick wanted to change that.
He wanted to make the computer a collaborator. He wanted man-computer symbiosis.
He said we've got to work with computers the same way that a fig wasp pollinates a fig.
Really, that's that's the analogy. If we did do that, he believed that
that time would be "intellectually the most creative and exciting in the history of mankind."
This paper envisioned basically everything that we do today to interact with computers.
So in 1962, ARPA is intrigued by this guy who understands psychology
but is also super into computers. And so they hire him to come to Washington
to work in the Pentagon, and to try to make computers work for them. And Lick— he agrees.
Let's go ahead, I'm going to scan my head.
I'm trying to stand still. This is known as the double chin angle.
Okay, so I took 200 photos. Cool thing is it actually lets me work with the computer
to delete the photos that aren't of the object, uh, that i want to photograph
which is, you know, my head. The software is gonna
stitch these together in the cloud, create a 3d scan of my head. Upload and process, full detail.
So Lick ends up at ARPA. He is the guy pulling the strings
and giving funding to big projects and he did some legendary stuff.
He basically invented computer science as an academic department.
He also funded iconic projects. One person he funded was Doug Engelbart, who did the mother
of all demos, where he basically revealed the invention of the mouse and the graphical user
interface and hypertext too just for kicks. This was a hugely influential demo though,
and Licklider was kind of the person writing the checks.
But let's focus on the internet part and how Lick's hungry, totally quirky mind
tackled it. In "Man Computer Symbiosis," he was already envisioning "thinking centers" in
which libraries were connected to one another by wide communication lines. The internet!
Lick made up the internet! Now at ARPA, in 1963 he wrote this kind
of crazy sounding memo to members and affiliates of the "intergalactic computer network." In it,
he took an existing concept called time sharing—this was the idea that individual consoles
could run off of one computer. Basically, imagine cloud computing, but in the 1960s.
He extended that idea to an integrated network. Now though, Lick had the influence to make people
listen and the money to make it happen. This memo and Lick's other writing,
that's what sets the ball rolling for the first real internet. A few years later,
ARPANET connected computers around the country to one another and then that set up the internet,
which leads to me telling you on your screen that JCR Licklider saw it all more than 60 years ago.
Okay, we are ready, let's check it out. All right, I look like somebody
microwaved a Madame Tussaud's figure. So this is not Polycam's fault, I think I
could have done a little better on the conditions. I actually did two scans, let me look at this one.
So I think this one got my face a little better. There's the angle everyone wants.
Thumbnail! Even though I did it in the world's jankiest way, this is still
pretty amazing. So that's fun, but obviously "Man Computer Symbiosis" wasn't about me scanning my
head into a phone and becoming a computer. However, in a way, programs like these they
kind of are Lick's vision: an easy to navigate computer interface, with all the computing done
in the cloud on a computer far away. So why does Lick still matter?
If you just predicted all this, I don't know if I'd really care. Sci-fi writer
Arthur C. Clarke basically did predict the internet in the 1960s, we have the videotape.
"He will have in his own house not a computer as big as this, but at least a console to which you
can talk to his friendly local computer and get all the information he needs for his everyday
life, like his bank statements his theater reservations. All the information you need in
the course of living in a complex modern society, this will be in a compact form in his own house."
That is great, but you can find a prediction of almost anything.
Lick envisioned interconnected computers, but he also made them happen.
The great man theory of history is out of fashion these days — that's this idea that one colossus
can tug history in a new direction. Today, people prefer structural explanations.
To be clear, Lick would be the first person to credit a ton of other people for ARPANET,
let alone the internet. And, honestly, I'm kind of skeptical of the great man theory these days,
largely because that's, you know, something that mediocre men
are naturally going to be skeptical of. That said, Lick had phenomenal vision for
man and computer to work together across space. But you know what? A programming
legend puts it a little better than I do. "It took not only a ripening of the computer field
but it also took money, and it took an imagination with the control and access to
support in order for this to take place."
Hey, uh, that is it for this video. I got this guy up here now.
If you haven't been here before, this is a personal channel where I talk
about personal stuff, history stuff, stuff like that. Occasionally I'll scan my head,
uh apologies again to Polycam, I know I was using your software wrong, uh but it was still fun.
Uh yeah, basically this video like changed how I think about the internet in a big way
and even how I think about like how much individuals can influence history. I know
it sounds a bit over the top, but it's true. I really enjoyed diving into this book
and learning a little about Lick. There are a lot of other names that I could have
included in this video, so if you have any that you think are worth mentioning in the comments,
that would be awesome, I'd love to like start a discussion about that. But in the meantime,
thanks for watching and hopefully i'll see you in the next video. Bye.