Where Wizards Stay Up Late

by Matthew Lyon

  Licklider’s ideas, which had their beginnings just a few years earlier in a chance encounter in the basement of Lincoln Lab, represented some of the most daring and imaginative thinking of the day. One former MIT student, Robert Rosin, who had taken an experimental psychology course from Lick in 1956 and later went into computer science, read “Man-Computer Symbiosis” and was awestruck by the elder’s intellectual versatility. “For the life of me, I could not imagine how a psychologist who, in 1956, had no apparent knowledge of computers, could have written such a profound and insightful paper about ‘my field’ in 1960,” Rosin said. “Lick’s paper made a deep impression on me and refined my own realization that a new age of computing was upon us.”

  In the moment that Licklider published the paper, his reputation as a computer scientist was fixed forever. He shed the mantle of psychology and took on computing. There was no turning him back. A couple of years before the paper was published, Licklider had left MIT to work at a small consulting and research firm in Cambridge called Bolt Beranek and Newman. The company had agreed to buy him two computers for his research, and he was having the time of his life.

  One day in 1962, ARPA director Jack Ruina called Licklider with a new job possibility. What would Lick say to taking on not just ARPA’s command and control division, but a new behavioral sciences division as well? And there’d be a huge computer, the Q-32, thrown into the deal.

  Ruina also called on Fred Frick, a friend and colleague of Lick’s at Lincoln Lab. Frick and Licklider met with Ruina together. Licklider went in prepared just to listen but was soon waxing eloquent on the topic. The problems of command and control, he told Ruina, were essentially problems of human-computer interaction. “I thought it was just ridiculous to be having command and control systems based on batch processing,” he recalled years later. “Who can direct a battle when he’s got to write the program in the middle of the battle?” Licklider and Frick agreed that the job seemed interesting, but neither wanted to leave what he was doing.

  Ruina’s sales pitch was so intense, however, and he made the mission seem so critical, that Frick and Licklider decided one of them should do it. They tossed a coin, and Lick accepted the position on the condition that he be given the freedom to lead the program in any direction he saw fit. Partly because Ruina was very busy, and partly because he didn’t understand computers himself, he agreed to the proviso without hesitation.

  Lick belonged to a small group of computer scientists who believed that people could be much more effective if they had at their fingertips a computer system with good displays and good databases. Before moving to Washington in the fall of 1962, Lick gave a series of computer seminars at the Pentagon, well attended by Defense Department and military officials. His message, already something of a mantra up in Cambridge but still largely unfamiliar to a military audience, was that a computer should be something anyone could interact with directly, eliminating computer operators as the middlemen in solving their problems.

  To this end, Lick saw great promise in time-sharing and was one of its most ardent evangelists. Time-sharing didn’t exactly put a computer on everyone’s desk, but it created the illusion of just that. It brought the power of the computer right to everyone’s fingertips. It gave people a strong feel for the machine.

  The promotion of time-sharing was by no means Lick’s sole mission when he arrived at ARPA. He was just as keen on exploring the ideas that had been percolating around human-machine interaction for several years.

  When Lick arrived for his first day at work, on October 1, 1962, his secretary said, “Well, Dr. Licklider, you have just one appointment today. There are some gentlemen coming from the Bureau of the Budget to review your program.” When the budget officers arrived, they were amused to discover it was Licklider’s first day. There wasn’t much of substance to discuss yet. The command and control program consisted of one $9 million contract—with System Development Corporation—and the remaining $5 million or so in the budget was still unassigned. Instead of a budget review, the meeting was transformed into a private colloquium, in which Lick expounded on such topics as time-sharing, interactive computing, and artificial intelligence. Like many others before them, the accountants were infected by Licklider’s enthusiasm. “I told them what I was excited about, and that turned out to work greatly to my favor, because they got interested in it,” he said later. “And when we did have a meeting on it, they did not take any of my money away.”

  The principal charter he’d been given was to come up with uses for computers other than as tools for numerical scientific calculations. Lick developed new programs partly as a reaction against some of the applications the Defense Department had in mind for large computers. Air Force intelligence, for instance, wanted to harness huge mainframes to detect patterns of behavior among high-level Soviet officials. The computer would be fed intelligence information from a variety of human sources, such as hearsay from cocktail parties or observations at a May Day parade, and try to develop a best-guess scenario on what the Soviets might be up to. “The idea was that you take this powerful computer and feed it all this qualitative information, such as ‘The air force chief drank two martinis,’ or ‘Khrushchev isn’t reading Pravda on Mondays.’” recalled Ruina. “And the computer would play Sherlock Holmes and conclude that the Russians must be building an MX-72 missile or something like that.”

  First Ruina, then Licklider, tried putting a stop to such “asinine kinds of things,” as Lick described the ill-conceived projects. Then Lick worked to find the country’s foremost computer centers and set up research contracts with them. In short order, he had reached out to the best computer scientists of the day, from Stanford, MIT, UCLA, Berkeley, and a handful of companies, bringing them into ARPA’s sphere. All told, there were about a dozen in Lick’s inner circle, which Ruina called “Lick’s priesthood.” In typical fashion, where his most passionate beliefs masqueraded as a bit of a joke, Licklider nicknamed it the Intergalactic Computer Network.

  Six months after his arrival at ARPA, Lick wrote a lengthy memo to the members of the Intergalactic Network in which he expressed his frustration over the proliferation of disparate programming languages, debugging systems, time-sharing system control languages, and documentation schemes. In making the case for an attempt at standardization, Lick discussed the hypothetical problem of a network of computers. “Consider the situation in which several different centers are netted together, each center being highly individualistic and having its own special language and its own special way of doing things,” he posited. “Is it not desirable or even necessary for all the centers to agree upon some language or, at least, upon some conventions for asking such questions as ‘What language do you speak?’At this extreme, the problem is essentially the one discussed by science-fiction writers: How do you get communications started among totally uncorrelated sapient beings?”

  That said, Lick hedged his bets. “It will possibly turn out,” he continued, “that only on rare occasions do most or all of the computers in the overall system operate together in an integrated network. It seems to me to be important, nevertheless, to develop a capability for integrated network operation.” And therein lay the seed of Licklider’s grandest vision yet. He would extend the concept of the Intergalactic Network to mean not just a group of people to whom he was sending memos but a universe of interconnected computers over which all might send their memos.

  Licklider was no exception to the rule that people didn’t spend a long time at ARPA. But by the time he left in 1964, he had succeeded in shifting the agency’s emphasis in computing R&D from a command systems laboratory playing out war-game scenarios to advanced research in time-sharing systems, computer graphics, and improved computer languages. The name of the office, Command and Control Research, had changed to reflect that shift, becoming the Information Processing Techniques Office. Licklider chose his successor, a colleague named Ivan Sutherland, the world’s leading expert in computer graphics. In 1965 Suthe
rland hired a young hotshot named Bob Taylor, who would soon sit down in ARPA’s terminal room and wonder why, with so many computers, they were unable to communicate with one another.

  Taylor’s Idea

  Bob Taylor had started college in Dallas at the age of sixteen thinking he would follow his father’s footsteps and become a minister. His family never lived in one place very long, moving from one Methodist church to another around Texas, in towns with names like Uvalde, Victoria, and Ozona. But instead of the service of the Lord, Taylor entered the service of the U.S. Navy when his reserve unit was called to active duty for the Korean War.

  Taylor spent the war at the Dallas Naval Air Station—“the USS Neverfloat,” he called it. At the end of the war, he entered the University of Texas on the GI Bill with no particular course of study in mind. He finally graduated in 1957 with a major in psychology and a minor in mathematics.

  Taylor pursued his love for science into graduate school at UT and wrote his dissertation on psychoacoustics, a field from which some people were making a leap into computing. Taylor jumped, too. “When I was in graduate school, there was no computer science,” Taylor recollected, “so I didn’t really have much of an introduction to computing. But I began to feel that computing research was going to be much more rewarding.”

  Fresh from school, Taylor held a few jobs in the aerospace industry before landing a job at NASA in 1961, where he worked as a program officer in Washington, D.C., in the Office of Advanced Research and Technology. One day in 1963 Taylor was invited to join an unofficial committee of government program managers, all of whom were involved in funding computer research. It was an informal group that simply exchanged information about their projects, looked for ways of collaborating, and tried to avoid duplication or overlap. The invitation had come, as it turned out, from someone who had been Taylor’s intellectual role model in psychoacoustics—J. C. R. Licklider. He was head of the committee. Licklider’s early work in psychoacoustics had deeply influenced Taylor’s own and he welcomed the chance to meet the illustrious Licklider.

  Taylor was struck by how unassuming he was. “He flattered me right off by saying he knew my thesis work,” Taylor said. Here was a man with a giant reputation who was probably one of the nicest, most easygoing people Taylor had ever met.

  When Taylor first joined the committee, Licklider was in the process of pulling together the computer science community under ARPA, the new generation of researchers drawn to interactive computing. They were busily framing their bold new perspective, radically different from the mainstream in computer research and development during the previous two decades. Mountains of money and years of work had been invested in improving the technical parameters of speed, reliability, and memory size of computers. But this small avant-garde of researchers concentrated at MIT and around Boston had begun working on making the computer an amplifier of human potential, an extension of the mind and body.

  Taylor was known for having a good bit of intuition himself. He was considered a farsighted program officer who had a knack for picking innovative winners—both projects and researchers. He joined ARPA in early 1965, following Licklider’s departure, to work as deputy to Ivan Sutherland, IPTO’s second director. Months later, in 1966, at the age of thirty-four, Taylor became the third director of IPTO, inheriting responsibility for the community and much of the vision—indeed the very office—established by Licklider. The only difference, which turned out to be crucial, was that ARPA—now headed by Charles Herzfeld, an Austrian physicist who had fled Europe during the war—was even faster and looser with its money than it had been during Ruina’s tenure. A joke now circulated among its program directors: Come up with a good idea for a research program and it will take you about thirty minutes to get the funding.

  The “terminal problem,” as Taylor called it, was a source of frustration not just for him but for Sutherland before him and for Licklider before that. One day, shortly after becoming IPTO director, Taylor found himself rolling around an idea Lick had discussed with him several times but never actually acted on. Now that it was his watch, Taylor decided to act.

  Taylor headed straight to Herzfeld’s office. No memos. No meetings. Other program directors were slightly intimidated by Herzfeld, a large man with a thick rumbling Viennese accent. But Taylor saw nothing to fear about the man. In fact, Taylor behaved like such a good old boy around his boss that someone once asked him,“Taylor, what have you got with Herzfeld? You must be related to Lyndon Johnson. You’re both from Texas, aren’t you?”

  Taylor told the ARPA director he needed to discuss funding for a networking experiment he had in mind. Herzfeld had talked about networking with Taylor a bit already, so the idea wasn’t new to him. He had also visited Taylor’s office, where he witnessed the annoying exercise of logging on to three different computers. And a few years earlier he had even fallen under the spell of Licklider himself when he attended Lick’s lectures on interactive computing.

  Taylor gave his boss a quick briefing: IPTO contractors, most of whom were at research universities, were beginning to request more and more computer resources. Every principal investigator, it seemed, wanted his own computer. Not only was there an obvious duplication of effort across the research community, but it was getting damned expensive. Computers weren’t small and they weren’t cheap. Why not try tying them all together? By building a system of electronic links between machines, researchers doing similar work in different parts of the country could share resources and results more easily. Instead of spreading a half dozen expensive mainframes across the country devoted to supporting advanced graphics research, ARPA could concentrate resources in one or two places and build a way for everyone to get at them. One university might concentrate on one thing, another research center could be funded to concentrate on something else, but regardless of where you were physically located, you would have access to it all. He suggested that ARPA fund a small test network, starting with, say, four nodes and building up to a dozen or so.

  The Defense Department was the largest buyer of computers in the world. Investing in a particular make of computer was no trivial decision, and it often put the different services in a bind, particularly when faced with a federal rule dictating that all manufacturers be given equal opportunity. There seemed to be no hope of curtailing the purchase of a whole variety of machines. And the chances seemed slim to nonexistent that the computing world would gravitate anytime soon to a set of uniform operating standards. Research sponsors like ARPA would just have to find some other way of overcoming the industry’s incompatibility problems. If the network idea worked, Taylor told Herzfeld, it would be possible for computers from different manufacturers to connect, and the problem of choosing computers would be greatly diminished. Herzfeld was so taken with that possibility that those arguments alone might have been enough to convince him. But there was another advantage, centering on the question of reliability. It might be possible to connect computers in a network redundantly, so that if one line went down, a message could take another path.

  “Is it going to be hard to do?” Herzfeld asked.

  “Oh no. We already know how to do it,” Taylor responded with characteristic boldness.

  “Great idea,” Herzfeld said. “Get it going. You’ve got a million dollars more in your budget right now. Go.”

  Taylor left Herzfeld’s office on the E-ring and headed back to the corridor that connected to the D-ring and his own office. He glanced at his watch. “Jesus Christ,” he said to himself softly. “That only took twenty minutes.”

  2

  A Block Here, Some Stones There

  By the time Taylor assumed the directorship of IPTO in 1966, manifestations of Licklider’s philosophy were evident throughout the computer research establishment. The ranks of researchers hoping to extend the computer beyond the status of a calculating instrument continued to grow throughout the decade. Some of the earliest and most important work in interactive graphics and virtual reality was ta
king place at the University of Utah using ARPA money. MIT in particular, seemed to breed one groundbreaking development after another. There Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert were engaged in important early work in artificial intelligence. Programs at other institutions focused on advanced programming techniques, time-sharing, and computer languages.

  Building a network as an end in itself wasn’t Taylor’s principal objective. He was trying to solve a problem he had seen grow worse with each round of funding. Researchers were duplicating, and isolating, costly computing resources. Not only were the scientists at each site engaging in more, and more diverse, computer research, but their demands for computer resources were growing faster than Taylor’s budget. Every new project required setting up a new and costly computing operation. Depending on the computer being used and the number of graduate students being supported, IPTO’s individual grants ranged from $500,000 to $3 million.