The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 60

Licklider felt that his love of art made him more intuitive. He could process a wide array of information and sniff out patterns. Another attribute, which would serve him well when he helped put together the team that laid the foundations for the Internet, was that he loved to share ideas without craving credit for them. His ego was so tamed that he seemed to enjoy giving away rather than claiming credit for ideas that were developed in conversation. “For all his considerable influence on computing, Lick retained his modesty,” said Bob Taylor. “His favorite kind of joke was one at his own expense.”¹⁸

TIME-SHARING AND MAN-COMPUTER SYMBIOSIS

At MIT Licklider collaborated with the artificial intelligence pioneer John McCarthy, in whose lab the hackers of the Tech Model Railroad Club had invented Spacewar. With McCarthy in the lead, they helped to develop, during the 1950s, systems for computer time-sharing.

Up until then, when you wanted a computer to perform a task, you had to submit a stack of punch cards or a tape to the computer’s operators, as if handing an offering to the priests who shielded an oracle. This was known as “batch processing,” and it was annoying. It could take hours or even days to get results back; any little mistake might mean having to resubmit your cards for another run; and you might not be able to touch or even see the computer itself.

Time-sharing was different. It allowed a whole lot of terminals to be hooked up to the same mainframe, so that many users could type in commands directly and get a response almost instantly. Like a grandmaster playing dozens of games of chess simultaneously, the mainframe’s core memory would keep track of all the users, and its operating system would be capable of multitasking and running many programs. This provided users with an enchanting experience: you could have a hands-on and real-time interaction with a computer, like a conversation. “We had a kind of little religion growing here about how this was going to be totally different from batch processing,” said Licklider.¹⁹

It was a key step toward a direct human-computer partnership or symbiosis. “The invention of interactive computing through time-sharing was even more important than the invention of computing itself,” according to Bob Taylor. “Batch processing was like exchanging letters with someone, while interactive computing was like talking to them.”²⁰

The importance of interactive computing became apparent at Lincoln Laboratory, the military-funded research center that Licklider helped to build at MIT in 1951. There he forged a team, half of them psychologists and half engineers, to look at ways that humans could interact more intuitively with computers and information could be presented with a friendlier interface.

One mission at Lincoln Laboratory was developing computers for an air defense system that would provide early warning of an enemy attack and coordinate a response. It was known as SAGE, for Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, and it cost more money and employed more people than the Manhattan Project that built the atom bomb. For it to work, the SAGE system needed to enable its users to have instant interactions with its computers. When an enemy missile or bomber was on the way, there would be no time for batch processing of the calculations.

The SAGE system included twenty-three tracking centers across the United States, which were connected by long-distance phone lines. It was able to disseminate information on up to four hundred fast-moving planes at once. This required powerful interactive computers, networks that could transmit vast amounts of information, and displays that could present this information in an easy-to-understand graphical fashion.

Because of his background in psychology, Licklider was called upon to help design the human-machine interfaces (what users saw on the screen). He formulated a set of theories about ways to cultivate a symbiosis, an intimate partnership, that would allow humans and machines to work cooperatively to solve problems. Particularly important was figuring out ways to visually convey changing situations. “We wanted methods of saving the air situation for successive seconds, and plotting tracks, not blips, and coloring the tracks so that we could see which was the recent information and tell which way the thing was going,” he explained.²¹ America’s fate might depend on the ability of a console jockey to assess data correctly and respond instantly.

The interactive computers, intuitive interfaces, and high-speed networks showed how people and machines could work together in a collaborative partnership, and Licklider imagined ways this could happen for more than air defense systems. He began to talk about what he called a “truly SAGE system” that would network not only air defense centers but also “thinking centers” incorporating vast libraries of knowledge, which people could interact with on friendly display consoles—in other words, the digital world we have today.

These ideas formed the basis for one of the most influential papers in the history of postwar technology, titled “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” which Licklider published in 1960. “The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly,” he wrote, “and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.” This sentence bears rereading, because it became one of the seminal concepts of the digital age.²²

Licklider sided with Norbert Wiener, whose theory of cybernetics was based on humans and machines working closely together, rather than with their MIT colleagues Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy, whose quest for artificial intelligence involved creating machines that could learn on their own and replicate human cognition. As Licklider explained, the sensible goal was to create an environment in which humans and machines “cooperate in making decisions.” In other words, they would augment each other. “Men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking.”

THE INTERGALACTIC COMPUTER NETWORK

As he combined his interests in psychology and engineering, Licklider became even more focused on computers. That led him in 1957 to sign on with the fledgling Cambridge-based firm of Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), a commercial-academic research company where many of his friends worked. As at Bell Labs when the transistor was being invented, BBN gathered a galvanizing mix of talent that included theorists, engineers, technicians, computer scientists, psychologists, and the occasional Army colonel.²³

One of Licklider’s assignments at BBN was to lead a team tasked with figuring out how computers could transform libraries. He dictated his final report, “Libraries of the Future,” in the course of five hours while sitting by the pool during a conference in Las Vegas.²⁴ It explored the potential “of devices and techniques for on-line man-computer interaction,” a concept that foreshadowed the Internet. He envisioned the accumulation of a huge database of information that was curated and weeded so that “it doesn’t get too diffuse, overwhelming, or unreliable.”

In a colorful part of the paper, he presented a fictional scenario in which he posed questions to the machine. He imagined the machine’s activity: “Over the week-end it retrieved over 10,000 documents, scanned them all for sections rich in relevant material, analyzed all the rich sections into statements in a high-order predicate calculus, and entered the statements into the data base.” Licklider realized that the approach he described would eventually be superseded. “Certainly, a more sophisticated approach will be feasible before 1994,” he wrote, looking three decades into the future.²⁵ He was remarkably prescient. In 1994 the first text-crawling search engines, WebCrawler and Lycos, were developed for the Internet, and they were quickly followed by Excite, Infoseek, AltaVista, and Google.