J. C. R. Licklider (1915-1990)
Six-foot tall acoustic psychologist with a lazy Ozark drawl, who shaped computer science research in the United States after World War II. Educated at Washington University in psychology, mathematics and physics, Lick received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. He then moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, becoming part of the MIT community. There he worked with Bush’s Differential Analyzer and attended Wiener’s roundtables. As director of the ARPA computing initiative in the wake of Sputnik, he supported the creation of first computer science departments in the nation, funded and championed a generation of researchers including Marvin Minsky and Doug Engelbart, and pushed his vision of the Intergalactic Network. That vision inspired the ARPAnet, precursor to the Internet.
- Man-Computer Symbiosis (Part of an Oral Report) (1958)
- Man-Computer Symbiosis (1960)
- Libraries of the Future (1965)
- Computer as a Communication Device (with Bob Taylor, 1968)
a MIT professor who participated in WW II and worked at BBN, then ARPA, inspiring development of ARPAnet with his dream of an intergalactic network and wrote Libraries of the Future and Man-Computer Symbiosis