J. C. R. Licklider

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (March 11, 1915 – June 26, 1990), known simply as J. C. R. or "Lick", was an American psychologist and computer scientist who is considered to be among the most prominent figures in computer science development and general computing history.

He is particularly remembered for being one of the first to foresee modern-style interactive computing and its application to all manner of activities; and also as an Internet pioneer with an early vision of a worldwide computer network long before it was built.

He did much to initiate this by funding research that led to significant advances in computing technology, including today's canonical graphical user interface, and the ARPANET, which is the direct predecessor of the Internet.

He has been called "computing's Johnny Appleseed", for planting the seeds of computing in the digital age.

Robert Taylor, founder of Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory and Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center, noted that "most of the significant advances in computer technology—including the work that my group did at Xerox PARC—were simply extrapolations of Lick's vision. They were not really new visions of their own. So he was really the father of it all".

This quotation from the full-length biography of him, The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop, gives some sense of his impact:

Licklider was born on March 11, 1915, in St. Louis, Missouri.

He was the only child of Joseph Parron Licklider, a Baptist minister, and Margaret Robnett Licklider.

Despite his father's religious background, he was not religious in later life.

He studied at Washington University in St. Louis, where he received a B.A. with a triple major in physics, mathematics, and psychology in 1937 and an M.A. in psychology in 1938.

He received a Ph.D. in psychoacoustics from the University of Rochester in 1942 as well as a Doctorate in Psychology from the University of Rochester, that same year.

Thereafter he worked at Harvard University as a research fellow and lecturer in the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory 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 the MIT Lincoln Laboratory and a psychology program for engineering students.

While at MIT, Licklider was involved in the SAGE project as head of the team concerned with human factors.

While at MIT in the 1950s, Licklider worked on Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), a Cold War project 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.

He worked as a human factors expert, which helped convince him of the great potential for human/computer interfaces.

Licklider became interested in information technology early in his career.

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.

Much like Vannevar Bush's, 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.

Licklider was instrumental in conceiving, funding and managing the research that led to modern personal computers and the Internet.

In the psychoacoustics field, Licklider is most remembered for his 1951 "Duplex Theory of Pitch Perception", presented in a paper which has been cited hundreds of times, was reprinted in a 1979 book, and formed the basis for modern models of pitch perception.

He was also the first to report binaural unmasking of speech.

In 1957, he received the Franklin V. Taylor Award from the Society of Engineering Psychologists.

Licklider left MIT to become a vice president at Bolt Beranek and Newman in 1957.

In 1958, he was elected President of the Acoustical Society of America, and in 1990 he received the Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service.

He learned about time-sharing from Christopher Strachey at a UNESCO-sponsored conference on Information Processing in Paris in 1959.

At BBN he developed the BBN Time-Sharing System and conducted the first public demonstration of time-sharing.

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, an appointment he kept through July 1964.

In April 1963, he sent a memo to his colleagues in outlining the early challenges presented in establishing a time-sharing network of computers with the software of that time.

Ultimately his vision led to ARPANet, the precursor of today's Internet.

After serving as manager of information sciences, systems and applications at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York from 1964 to 1967, Licklider rejoined MIT as a professor of electrical engineering in 1968.

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 provided inspiration for some elements of the Unix operating system developed at Bell Labs by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie in 1970.

During this period, he concurrently served as director of Project MAC until 1971.

Following a second stint as IPTO director (1974–1975), his MIT faculty line was transferred to the Institute's Laboratory for Computer Science, where he was based for the remainder of his career.

He was a founding member of Infocom in 1979, known for their interactive fiction computer games.

He retired and became professor emeritus in 1985.

He died in 1990 in Arlington, Massachusetts; his cremated remains are interred in Mount Auburn Cemetery.