J.C.R. Licklider on the History of Personal Workstations (1986) [video] | Hacker News Reader

J.C.R. Licklider on the History of Personal Workstations (1986) [video]

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154 pointsdang28 comments

This is the only talk online by the visionary who conceived and funded the Internet. It's quite amazing, though it needs a bit of patience at first; stick with it. Licklider was everybody's genius absent-minded uncle, and this is your chance to join the family.

He covers a myriad of ideas about interactive computing, many of which are still futuristic. He strongly defends 'open' software and talks about Moore's Law under a different name. You get glimpses into how his mind works. He mentions dozens of different researchers and now-forgotten strands of work. He tells great stories, such as how he was walking in the dark, fell into an open grave, had trouble getting out so sat down to think instead, and came up with the idea of the personal workstation. The bits about analog computers are fascinating. There are cameos by Butler Lampson and others.

Licklider was the sort of prophet whose vision usually remains unexecuted, but he turned out to be a social genius too, with an unmatched eye for talent. Some spacetime wormhole landed him at DARPA with a budget in 1962 and he played his cards brilliantly. It's an if-only story that actually worked out. We all owe this guy.

It's Saturday. Take some time and watch this—it's a rare window into the background of our world. Watch it all the way to the end and you'll get to hear Alan Perlis quip that the historical purpose of AT&T was Bell Labs.

Edit: Forgot to mention that I found it via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10989390. Thanks, whistlerbrk!

tips hat my pleasure. I'll add that I've recently begun to read about the fascinating early history of computing myself through a series of HN threads which led me to read, "Tools for Thought" by Howard Rheingold. That book is highly cited in another book mentioned here in the comments about Licklider, "The Dream Machine".

I highly recommend Tools for Thought. It is very clear from reading these histories that the early pioneers of the field knew with a very high degree of accuracy how the future of computing would play out over the coming decades. That book is humbling to say the least.

The owner of this Youtube channel works at VPRI with Alan Kay. I believe he mentioned he got a bunch of these tapes from Alan, which he has then been digitizing and uploading now and then.

A number of these ACM talks were recently made available on Youtube by the Computer History Museum [1], with talks/reflections by Butler Lampson, Chuck Tacker, Doug Engelbart, Larry Roberts, Gordon Bell, and many more.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerHistory/videos

The tape was from the collection of the Computer History Museum, inherited from the collection of their predecessor, the Computer History Museum in Boston. It had just never been digitized. There's a blog post on it here: http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-1986-acm-conference...

I just finished reading "The Dream Machine" and recommend it highly to anyone in the industry. It's got Licklider a the forefront.

http://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution-Com...

This should be on every programmer's "Must Read" list of computer history books. I would put this up there with "Hackers" in terms of the volume of critical information about how basic questions of computer science were answered.

I'd add on "What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry". The three together and the three gives very nicely complementary angles and additional stories.

"Where Wizards Stay Up Late"[0] is a fascinating account of the invention of the internet (Licklider a major player). I found it to be _much_ more interesting than I expected from the subject material. Highly recommended.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/06848326...

Another good read is "Machines of Loving Grace" [1]. Much more focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI) vs. Intelligence Amplification (IA), but covers a lot of the work influenced by Engelbart and Licklider.

[1] http://smile.amazon.com/Machines-Loving-Grace-Common-Between...

Oh, very neat. I've read most of the papers in the proceedings of this conference, the 1986 ACM Conference on the History of Personal Workstations [1], which is full of great information. But while 10 of the 13 speakers wrote up their talks as papers for the proceedings, three didn't, and this was one of the missing ones (the other two were the talks from Alan Kay and Charles H. House). So it's great to now have the talk available.

[1] Open access, click on the "table of contents" tab: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=12178&picked=prox

Weird timing! Just this afternoon I finished cleaning up a transcript of an Oral History interview with Licklider from 1988:

http://wcarss.ca/refs/aspray-licklider-interview.html

Hey, I'm reading that and there's an apparent typo of "oral" which should be "aural": "and I put together oral radar"

Edit: Also, some footnotes might be helpful.

There's a reference to problems with DC bias when all bits are the same; could be good to put that in contemporary context of 8b/10b codes etc.

The following words seem to be a reference to Christopher Strachey: "Licklider: Yes, probably the first person who wrote about it was a young Britisher. He mentioned the concept at a computer meeting in Paris, I think in 1960 -- sponsored by UNESCO, maybe."

See http://www.bobbemer.com/TIMESHAR.HTM

Ah thanks, I was wondering who that was! The interviewers just nod along when he says it.

Good idea on adding some footnotes like that. I'm trying to get a paper/interview/essay-reading group started (which is why I'm hosting the page) and some additional support material would likely be quite useful for folks in reading it.

That sounds really good and I look forward to reading it, but I also recommend you post it to HN, perhaps in a week or two, since the community here tends not to like repetition.

Funny, that's exactly what I thought when I saw this here. Just last night I was watching some of the other videos from this event on ComputerHistory's YouTube channel, realised this one was missing and went looking for it. Was very surprised to have a visited link second from the top of HN!

This guy funded Douglas Engelbart (mother of all demos). Doug mentions him in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1oNBImSX0M

The youtube poster's video collection is full of similar material. https://www.youtube.com/user/yoshikiohshima/videos

A few mins from the end of the video, he said he wished they had picked another name than "workstation". Then someone from the audience suggested a different name, which Licklider said would probably sell better. Can anyone make out that name?

P "something" stations, almost like "pleasurestation". Hard to make out.

You might be right—it would explain why Licklider replies by joking that it would sell better.

Jeff Moser on Licklider:

http://www.moserware.com/2008/05/who-is-this-licklider-guy.h...

If you want more like I did, this interview with Licklider's son contains quite a bit of information:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi4pVeyAhU0

And this is only a minute long but has some great clips of Licklider and Larry Roberts. Anybody know what broadcast it came from?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GfOTUoBpRw

I spotted something, but it doesn't seem to be related to the "one minute" vid you linked to. None the less, it's fun; "J.C.R. Licklider in One Minute"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMpfmDEC5JQ

The 1963 "Intergalactic Computer Network" paper is also fun reading.

http://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider-IntergalacticNetwork.pd...

Starts at 4:30, direct link: https://youtu.be/SN--t9jXQc0?t=270

This was really good listening for a lazy Saturday. He pretty much outlays the road to tablet PCs, massive LCD TVs, etc.

He talked a lot about input and displays. I wonder what he would think of today's tablets and touchscreen laptops.

I was surprised by how early the work on touchscreens he mentions was. Was it the 1950s, or am I misremembering?

The one I want most is the brain-computer interface he talks about. It's disappointing that we haven't gotten further on that in 30 years.

When the "touch screen" was invented depends on how you define the term. For "light pen" based system, early/mid 1950's. For capacitive systems, it's the mid/late 1960's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pen

>"The first light pen was created around 1955 as part of the Whirlwind >project at MIT.[2][3]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#History

>"E.A. Johnson described his work on capacitive touchscreens in a short article published in 1965[6] and then more fully with photographs and diagrams in an article published in 1967.[7]"

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