Licklider

Licklider The year is 1962; John Fitzgerald Kennedy is President of the United States, the Cuban Missile Crisis is scaring the American people, and the space race with Russia is already afoot. Yet, a humble forty-seven year old man sits in Robert McNamara’s Pentagon office, planning a revolution that will forever change the world and our perceptions of the computer. Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider envisioned a world where computers empower, rather then force us into submission. His imagination stretched the boundaries of existing beliefs with such concepts as point-and-click user interfaces, e-commerce, digital libraries, and a network that would link everyone around the world into a communication medium. Though most of J.C.R. Licklider’s contributions were ideas not inventions, he was one of the most innovative men of his time, bringing the very thought of personal computers alive. Licklider was born in St. Louis and later attended Washington University where he received three bachelors’ degrees in math, physics, and psychology. He did his doctoral work in psychoacoustics and in 1942, he went to work at Harvard's Psychoacoustics Laboratory where he worked with the Air Force to find solutions for the communication problems faced by crewman in noisy bomber aircraft. Licklider licklider, computer, computers, time, one, network, universities, work, world, system, man, later, large, information, ideas, idea, each, called, very, symbiosis, sought, rather, punch, plotting, out, lick, jcr, hours, great, force, decision, data, cards, 1965, yet