The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Author:M. Mitchell Waldrop
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2016-05-09T14:00:00+00:00

THE FATHER OF IT ALL

In the long rebellion against batch processing, and against the authoritarian mind-set that went with it, Project MAC's break with IBM was about as close as things ever got to open warfare. Yet J. C. R. Licklider—the commander in chief, so to speak—kept his distance from the fray. The choice of a next-generation computer was Tech Square's to make, he felt. And besides, why get involved with that battle when he was preparing to infiltrate the enemy lines all by himself? In mid-1964, at about the same time that Fano and company were deciding on the GE 635, IBM chief scientist Mannie Piore had invited Lick to join IBM's research division, headquartered at the new Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. And Lick had accepted.

With the correspondence long gone and memories hazy at best, it's hard to know exactly what Lick's intentions were—or Piore's, either, for that matter. Piore himself now maintains that the invitation had nothing to do with Project MAC; he was simply on the lookout for outstanding talent. And indeed, that would have been very much in character. The Russian-born physicist had taken over as IBM's first director of research in September 1956 and had spent the intervening years building an organization with world-class capabilities in solid-state physics, mathematics, superconductivity, and a host of other fields. (In the process, he had also consolidated many of IBM's scattered research activities at the Yorktown Heights site, some twenty-five miles north of Manhattan; the laboratory building, designed by Eero Saarinen, opened its doors in April 1961.) Nevertheless, the coincidence was striking. Given the embarrassment of losing Project MAC to GE, Piore could hardly be blamed if he saw hiring Lick as an effective way to acquire some in-house expertise in interactive computing.

As for Lick, he may simply have felt that it was time for him to move on. The tradition was for ARPA program directors to step down after two or three years in any case, to make room for new people with new ideas. Then, too, with two teenagers who would soon be starting college, Lick can't have been entirely unaware of IBM's lavish salary scale. Nor could he ignore how stressful Washington had been for his family. Louise had been forced to give up an apprenticeship at the Arena Stage, which she loved, and put her theater career on indefinite hold; with two children at home, a husband who was always on the road, and rehearsals at night, scheduling had become a nightmare. Tracy and Linda, meanwhile, had had a rough time adjusting to school. Their parents had innocently enrolled them in private school before they arrived, since a commitment had to be made and Lick had not yet located a place for the family to live. But to their horror, the school had turned out to be a segregation academy: pristine white, very conservative, and run by not-very-bright retired colonels. (Tracy, in particular, loathed the place. In the Cambridge public schools, he had been going through the fast-track science curriculum ever since Sputnik.

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