During the war, there was a lot of computer technology developed in all of UK and US (and Germany, although that was mostly electromechanical and so was a sort of dead end). After the war, the US and UK took totally different approaches. In the UK, everyone who had worked at Bletchley Park was sworn to secrecy, all the equipment was destroyed, and the plans were meant to have been. but luckily some at the Post Office (this was still the era when phones and post were in the same organizations known as PTTs in Europe). As a result, everything had to be started from scratch all over again, and without really being able to build on the prior work. Eventually, it turned out that many of the people who ended up as heads of computer science departments around Britain had been at Bletchley Park as young men. But it probably set British computer science back by ten or twenty years. The US took the opposite approach, and set up seminars and disseminated what had been learned into the universities and industry as quickly as possible. People like Von Neumann, Mauchly, and Eckert became rapidly famous based on their war work. In UK, even Turing was relatively unknown outside of the context of his earlier mathematical work before the war. He has become a superhero recently, partly because his story makes for great books and movies. Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, known as JCR or "Lick", was a significant player in US computer science in a couple of different ways. Firstly, he had an early vision of a better way of computing. This was the era that I caught the end of as an undergraduate, where if you want to get anything done, you had to punch cards (or maybe paper tape) and give them to an "operator" who actually ran the computer, and get your printout later (or maybe overnight). Lick thought that there were better ways, and first he wrote about them, and then he made them happen. Lick was the author of two seminal papers. The first, in 1960, was Man-Computer Symbiosis, which reported on one of the earliest ever "time-sharing systems" built at BBN on a Digital PDP-1 in the late 1950s. A time-sharing system was one that supported a number of connected terminals and gave each one the impression that it had the computer to itself. One reason programmers have a reputation for burning the midnight oil is that time-sharing systems ran faster at night when there was less competition for the limited compute power available. The second, with Robert Taylor, was The Computer as a Communication Device, published in 1968. This forecast many of the aspects of computer communication that we take for granted today (and remember, this is in 1968 pre...well, pre pretty much everything). It is a rare example of an academic paper that came complete with cartoons (some of which would not pass any sort of political correctness test today). In 1962, Lick was asked by ARPA to manage a program for funding research. It was actually a small program by ARPA standards but it was a large one by US government standards, larger than all the other money allocated to computer research. This was the beginning of the program that led to time-sharing in the late 1960s and to ARPANET in the early to mid-1970s. So Lick has a strong claim to be the true father of the internet, although he was apparently a very modest man and would never make any such statement. Funnily enough, the computer establishment, IBM and the seven dwarves (RCA, GE, Burroughs, Univac, NCR, CDC, and Honeywell), argued against time-sharing as being inneficient use of machine resources. I suspect that they were against it more because it was very efficient use of computer resources, and so they would sell fewer machines. Perhaps more importantly still, Lick's ARPA responsibilities included selecting and funding researchers to build and lead research groups. Prior to Lick's work at ARPA, there were no doctorates in computer science. Of course, Lick himself didn't have one, by definition. His background was in psychology, before computer science had really been invented (he was born in 1915). But prior to 1965, no university granted a PhD in computer science. But you can't just conjure up a PhD program out of nowhere, a university graduate program requires a research base, and a research base requires a long-term commitment of dollars. Lick's ARPA program provided the foundation for the research base at four of the first universities to establish graduate programs in computer science. If I asked you to name what are the top departments of computer science in the US today, in 2018, you'd likely say UC Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, and CMU. Yes, those were the four that Lick funded, starting in 1965. Their pre-eminence today is based on their past success, of course, but that success would have been impossible without Lick's support. As Robert Taylor (who founded Xerox PARC, so has his own place in history) said in 1990: Lick’s vision provided an extremely fruitful, long-term direction for computing research. He guided the initial research funding that was necessary to fulfil the early promises of the vision. And he laid the foundation for graduate education in the newly created field of computer science. All users of interactive computing and every company that employs computer people owe him a great debt. On another occasion, talking about PARC, he said: 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. The two papers referred to above, and a tribute by Robert Taylor, are on the Stanford website . If you want to know more still, there is a 2001 book (out of print) The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal . Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.![]()
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