The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 61

Licklider also predicted something that was counterintuitive but has turned out to be pleasantly true: that digital information would not completely replace print. “As a medium for the display of information, the printed page is superb,” he wrote. “It affords enough resolution to meet the eye’s demand. It presents enough information to occupy the reader for a convenient quantum of time. It offers great flexibility of font and format. It lets the reader control the mode and rate of inspection. It is small, light, movable, cuttable, clippable, pastable, replicable, disposable, and inexpensive.”²⁶

In October 1962, while he was still working on his “Libraries of the Future” project, Licklider was recruited to Washington to head up a new office dealing with information processing at the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, then known as ARPA.^II Embedded in the Pentagon, it was empowered to fund basic research at universities and corporate institutes, thus becoming one of many ways the government implemented Vannevar Bush’s vision. It also had a more proximate cause. On October 4, 1957, the Russians launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite. The connection that Bush had made between science and defense was now twinkling in the sky every night. When Americans squinted to see it, they could also see that Bush was right: the nation that funded the best science would produce the best rockets and satellites. A ripple of healthy public panic ensued.

President Eisenhower liked scientists. Their culture and their mode of thinking, their ability to be nonideological and rational, appealed to him. “Love of liberty means the guarding of every resource that makes freedom possible—from the sanctity of our families and the wealth of our soil to the genius of our scientists,” he had proclaimed in his first inaugural address. He threw White House dinners for scientists, the way that the Kennedys would do for artists, and gathered many around him in advisory roles.

Sputnik gave Eisenhower the opportunity to formalize his embrace. Less than two weeks after it was launched, he gathered fifteen top science advisors who had worked with the Office of Defense Mobilization and asked them, his aide Sherman Adams recalled, “to tell him where scientific research belonged in the structure of the federal government.”²⁷ He then met for breakfast with James Killian, the president of MIT, and appointed him to be his full-time science advisor.²⁸ Together with the defense secretary, Killian worked out a plan, announced in January 1958, to put the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the Pentagon. As the historian Fred Turner wrote, “ARPA marked an extension of the defense-oriented military-university collaborations that began in World War II.”²⁹

The office within ARPA that Licklider was recruited to lead was called Command and Control Research. Its mission was to study how interactive computers could help facilitate the flow of information. There was another job opening to lead a group studying psychological factors in military decision making. Licklider argued that these two topics should be put together. “I started to wax eloquent on my view that the problems of command and control were essentially problems of man-computer interaction,” he later said.³⁰ He agreed to take both jobs and renamed his combined group ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO).

Licklider had a lot of exciting ideas and passions, most notably ways to encourage time-sharing, real-time interactivity, and interfaces that would nurture man-machine symbiosis. All of these tied together into a simple concept: a network. With his wry sense of humor, he began referring to his vision with the “intentionally grandiloquent” phrase “the Intergalactic Computer Network.”³¹ In an April 1963 memo addressed to “members and affiliates” of that dream network, Licklider described its goals: “Consider the situation in which several different centers are netted together . . . 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?’?”³²

BOB TAYLOR AND LARRY ROBERTS

Unlike many other partners who advanced the digital age, Bob Taylor and Larry Roberts were never friends, either before or after their time together at IPTO. Indeed, in later years they would bitterly disparage each other’s contributions. “Larry claims that he laid out the network himself, which is totally false,” Taylor complained in 2014. “Don’t trust what he says. I feel sorry for him.”³³ For his part, Roberts claims that Taylor is bitter because he did not get enough credit: “I don’t know what to give him credit for other than hiring me. That’s the only important thing Bob did.”³⁴

But during the four years they worked together at ARPA in the 1960s, Taylor and Roberts complemented each other well. Taylor was not a brilliant scientist; he didn’t even have a doctorate. But he had an affable, persuasive personality and was a magnet for talent. Roberts, by contrast, was an intense engineer with an abrupt manner, bordering on curt, who used to measure on a stopwatch the time it took to walk alternative routes between offices in the sprawling Pentagon. He didn’t charm his colleagues, but he often awed them. And his brusque direct manner made him a competent if not beloved manager. Taylor cajoled people, while Roberts impressed them with his intellect.

Bob Taylor was born in 1932 in a home for unwed mothers in Dallas, put on a train to an orphanage in San Antonio, and adopted when he was twenty-eight days old by an itinerant Methodist minister and his wife. The family uprooted every couple of years to pulpits in such towns as Uvalde, Ozona, Victoria, San Antonio, and Mercedes.³⁵ His upbringing, he said, left two imprints on his personality. As with Steve Jobs, who was also adopted, Taylor’s parents repeatedly emphasized that he had been “chosen, specially picked out.” He joked, “All the other parents had to take what they got, but I was chosen. That probably gave me an undeserved sense of confidence.” He also had to learn repeatedly, with each family move, to forge new relationships, learn new lingo, and secure his place in a small-town social order. “You’ve got to make a new set of friends and interact with a new set of prejudices every time.”³⁶

Taylor studied experimental psychology at Southern Methodist University, served in the Navy, and got a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from the University of Texas. While doing a paper on psychoacoustics, he had to submit his data on punch cards for batch processing at the university computing system. “I had to carry around stacks of cards that took days to get processed, and then they would say I had some comma wrong on card 653 or something and needed to have it all redone,” he said. “It made me angry.” He realized that there could be a better way when he read Licklider’s paper on interactive machines and man-computer symbiosis, which elicited a Eureka moment. “Yes, that’s how it should be!” he recalled saying to himself.³⁷

After teaching at a prep school and working at a defense contractor in Florida, Taylor got a job at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC, overseeing research on flight-simulation displays. Licklider was by then running the Information Processing Techniques Office at ARPA, where he began a regular series of meetings with other government researchers doing similar work. When Taylor showed up in late 1962, Licklider surprised him by knowing of the psychoacoustics paper he had written at the University of Texas. (Taylor’s advisor was a friend of Licklider.) “I was terribly flattered,” Taylor recalled, “so I became an admirer and really good friend of Lick’s from then on.”