Author:: M. Mitchell Waldrop Tags:#media/book
- themes::
- s
- Summary::
- biography on the life of L.F.G. Licklider the head of ARPA and seeded the start of the personal computing revolution
- Notes::
- Prologue
- Lick would ask kids everyday “what is something educational, creative, or altruistic that you did today?”
- computers used to only be for large institutions and everyone took that for granted
- Access was democratized for them
- What else can be democratized in this way that is only meant for large institutions right now?
- 1 - Missouri Boys ^tZRZVoRDZ
- Lick had come to believe that everyone deserved this
- “They [computers] would be humane and intimidate… Ultimately, they would enter into a kind of symbiosis with humans, forming a cohesive whole that would think more powerfully than any human being had ever thought and process data in ways that no machine could ever do by itself.”
- WW1 catalyzed funding of sound lab to get around noise of airplanes
- Lick had gotten PHd in psychology and was hired to the lab which was in Cambridge at Harvard and then went over to MIT to visit a lot where he encountered the computing folks
- Lick had come to believe that everyone deserved this
- 2 - The last transition ^h4n72n831
- follows Vannevar Bush life
- Claude Shannon makes the connection between the analog machines of switches that designate on/off with electric switches and circuits and connecting that with binary to make it possible to do any of those calculations electronically and therefore digitally. Also have if-then logic
- feedback is required for any voluntary action
- communication is required for control
- through feedback, a mechanism could embody purpose based on rules updating according to feedback
- thermostat is a piece of metal that bends and opens furnace when it gets to cold and straightens out when it gets too hot
- Von neumann typed up report summarizing efforts
- included the most important technical advance of concept of stored program: splitting hardware + software cleanly
- Divided labor and allowed software to become its own thing. the ideas abstracted away from the physical machine
- “Everything important about that spreadsheet-its on-screen appearance, its structure, its logic, its functionality, its ability to respond to the user—exists, like the harmonies and cadences of Bach, in an abstract platonic world of its own”
- “transition in focus from structure to behavior: from how computers were made to hat they could do“
- 3 - New kinds of people ^kmznx31ij
- post-war lots of cross-fertilization of ideas of all the scientists
- lots of delusions of grandeur that kept people from acknowledging new ideas
- Claude Shannon comes up with fundamental information theory
- rift between Von neumann and Wiener over politics (destroy russia vs. peace)
- idea of being able to reproduce yourself and how o achieve that via machine
- Wiener writes his book Cybernetics to describe his fundamental theories of communication and information but also to caution against always following scientific progress
- 4 - Freedom to make mistakes ^YBq1WDPuN
- Project Lincoln: air defense system for Cold War fully funded by pentagon
- Golden time because at cutting edge and everything was new and needed to be built from scratch
- State of controlled panic
- “Building and designing and doing everything simultaneously”
- Engineers set up data link with radars for real world data from start
- Project Lincoln: air defense system for Cold War fully funded by pentagon
- 5 - the tale of the fig tree and the wasp
- chapter is reference to analogy made by Lick in his Symbiosis paper, in which he argues the case for human-computer symbiosis, that fig tree and wasp are symbiotic and require each other to survive
- “All his [Lick’s] life he had been longing for a magical device that would let him implement ideas as fast as he could think of them.”
- seamless integration
- found that 85% of time was spent on procedural stuff that could be automated, how do you decrease or automate that time?
- questions to what extent is this observation still accurate today? ^MTkI7kYPU
- Fortran is created and “enlarged the user base by a factor of ten, at least” because of how it brought in people who were intimidated by machine language
- the synthesizer is what Lick was. “a guy who collected ideas as avidly as he collected people”
- “What it did was make him the integrator and synthesizer…, the one who provided the roadmap”
- digital computer models in principle combine best of both worlds of the static nature of a model and the dynamic nature of real life. Infinitely malleable but can be executed and made real. “the moldable, retentive, yet dynamic medium—the medium within which one can create and preserve the most complement and subtle patterns and through which one can make those patterns operate as program upon other patterns.”
- In execution, “becomes a process unfolding over time—not a text but a behavior”
- key behind interactivity was the ability to be not just thinking about the model but also feeling it viscerally. ^UENdfoqSl
- “The interactivity would open a high-bandwidth channel to our perceptions, to our instincts—to our deepest understanding.
- Bret Victor and Inventing on Principle
- key behind interactivity was the ability to be not just thinking about the model but also feeling it viscerally. ^UENdfoqSl
- Computers would greatly enhance ability to manage complexity
- “In addition to our classic formats—text, tables, diagrams, equations, and the like—we now have the power to represent knowledge as a process, an executable program.
- “information is a dynamic, living thing, not properly to be confined. As soon as information is freed from documental bounds and allowed to take on the form of process, the complexity of knowledge makes itself evident”
- dynamism as solution to complexity
- Shared frame and model
- 6 - the phenomena surrounding computers
- Lick is convinced to head up ARPA taking a year leave of absence
- Lick gathers the best computer scientists and throws money at them and creates a community across the nation
- Championing his vision for interactive computing and time sharing
- meets Doug Engelbart through this
- he had idea of augmentation of humans via dcomputers
- In Augmenting the Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework talks about what it means to “augment human intellect”
- “increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems… We do not speak of isolated clever tricks… We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human 'feel for a situation' usefully coexist with powerful concepts, streamlined technology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids
- intangibles feeling matters even when you cant point out what’s wrong with it
- intangibles in combination with tech to explore and augment it
- “increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems… We do not speak of isolated clever tricks… We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human 'feel for a situation' usefully coexist with powerful concepts, streamlined technology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids
- Lick finally getting to put into action the ideas he had articulated initially in Symbiosis
- idea around for >4 years -> takes time for ideas to develop and enter people’s hearts and minds
- Idea of computers as public utility like electricity
- difference is that information utility is two-way flow, people give back and create whole new resources
- “system became repository of the knowledge of the community”
- Corbato’s CTSS designed to be an open system, extendable by users by abstracting out the lowest levels and allowing users to build on those building blocks ^xXQovSSgW
- “I was always conscious of how we would explain this to a newcomer in a way where he could understand it quickly, without having to read a manual” Corbato
- difference is that information utility is two-way flow, people give back and create whole new resources
- shift of mindsets from DIY to sharing as sharing became a fundamental action
- “In the batch-processing world, Fano says, programming had generally been a do-it-yourself affair. Sharing a program with someone else would have meant duplicating a massive deck of punch cards, physically carrying the deck around, explaining how to format the input data on the cards, coaxing the program into running on an alien computer, and so on. Now you just stored one copy in the public repository and thereby effectively gave it to the world.” Instantly, people began to document their programs and to think of them as being useable by others and building on each others work”
- if people have mindset that it will be used, will design to be used -> need to just shift people’s mindset Tweak the Environment
- These ideas are related to the fundamental principles of the browser and internet in general ^mOiREEaSv
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- open and extensible by anyone, sharing is a primitive that is promoted
- Corbato’s CTSS designed to be an open system, extendable by users by abstracting out the lowest levels and allowing users to build on those building blocks ^xXQovSSgW
- made their own commands
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- openness requires trust — how to ensure trust in an anonymized world?
- faith in system AND faith in people that the system is shared with
- introduction of passwords and fault-tolerant systems and automatic sync backup
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- 7 - Intergalactic Network ^0vwukMjbM
- Arpanet created and evangelized into popular public via public demonstration: doesn’t matter if theoretical needs to be made practical and visceral
- The value of bringing separate smart people together and flourish ideas
- like what we did in 310 everyone got together in room and stress-tested systems
- ideas comparison of doing this in our class and this mental image of legends doing it for the very first time
- 8 - Living in the future ^W1eAD5kol
- Xerox PARC lab spins up to advance vision of ARPA
- Taylor’s philosophy was “don’t just invent the future, go live in it.”
- Whatever you’re doing use what you build
- Another ritual by Taylor or mandatory demo time among scattered research groups to diffuse ideas and build common purpose
- Like coda’s demo time
- Another ritual was concerting class one disagreements (just yelling) to class two (explain other side to their satisfaction) management change
- Alan Kay pioneers DynaBook (84:5 personal computer idea with philosophy for programming system of “simple things simple and complex things possible” that evolves into Smalltalk
- Taylor made a self-exciting system. Didn’t push his idea of connected personal computers from top, just hired people who saw his vision and implanted them
- Fundamental question never asked is how screens work
- Trace line super fast so it looks like a static image vs
- Line by line over entire screen but need to memorize screen size
- Process vs memory approach
- ARPAnet is successful and lots of similar but diff networks spinning up (alohanet with radio waves and packet backoff and redundancy) and satellites
- Kahn network guy for ARPA working on problem of connecting them all together—instead of centralizing into one single interface, disintegrated them so you have an adaptor between two specialized interfaces -> narrowing the thing that has to know about outside stuff
- Mechanism for making system work was make gateways that knew universal protocol and how to make messages for every type of network
- “In history of art,” says Alan Kay, “the most powerful work in any genre is done not by the adults who invent it, but by the first generation of kids who grow up in it.”
- What gen am I growing up in? questions
- Social media age
- Information revolution age
- Creation explosion age
- Diverse community
- What gen am I growing up in? questions
- 9 - Lick’s kids ^5q8kA6iYb
- DEC sold PDP-8 as an open computer system (ppl free to make hardware modifications as desired) which made them a platform business
- Computing as public utility via time sharing fell out of favor in lieu of personal computing (buy time vs buy computer once). Are we due for something more like a utility again though and if so why?
- Prologue