Man-Computer Symbiosis (1960) | Hacker News Reader

Man-Computer Symbiosis (1960)

groups.csail.mit.edu

39 pointsdrjohnson6 comments

It always makes me smile when guys like J.C.R. Licklider, Douglas Engelbart, William Ross Ashby, Herbert Simon, Alan Newell, Terry Winograd, etc., show up here. These guys were (or are) so far ahead of their time. It might seem strange to think that there's a lot to be learned from reading material from the 60's, but I'm convinced there is.

I'm personally convinced that we aren't even close to fully realizing Engelbart's vision in particular. I think anyone involved in the technology industry would be well served to read up on his writings - as well as catching up on the other writers/thinkers mentioned above.

One thing I love about reading old papers/essays/articles is that it makes it so clear the particular things we take for granted now. It is remarkably hard to step back and get that objective point of view about the current state of technology with no help from the past.

> They will remember that such-and-such a person did some possibly relevant work on a topic of interest back in 1947, or at any rate shortly after World War II, and they will have an idea in what journals it might have been published.

For all that the title evokes visions of cyborgs, Licklider here is really just asking for a search engine and the ability to plot some points on a graph, which is beautiful because these are things I do everyday, and they are indeed so useful and commonplace that I take them for granted, but even I couldn't always do these things in my lifetime.

I also found the following incredible as a train of thought:

> Yet there is continuing interest in the idea of talking with computing machines. In large part, the interest stems from realization that one can hardly take a military commander or a corporation president away from his work to teach him to type.

A relevant Wikipedia article on the context of these 1950s/1960s ideas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_amplification

I highly recommend this book [1] on Licklider's life, because it's also one of the best books on the computing movement from the creation of the early machines through the Xerox PARC years and slightly beyond. It's also the only one recommended by Alan Kay[2].

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution...

[2] http://www.mail-archive.com/fonc@vpri.org/msg04144.html

"Displays seem to be in a somewhat better state than controls."

Fifty years on, this still seems to be the case.

An interesting remark on user interfaces: "Laboratory experiments have indicated repeatedly that informal, parallel arrangements of operators, coordinating their activities through reference to a large situation display, have important advantages over the arrangement, more widely used, that locates the operators at individual consoles and attempts to correlate their actions through the agency of a computer." This remains surprisingly rare outside the military. Few systems support a working environment where each user has a small screen, and there's a big screen available to the whole group. Our user interfaces are still designed for a single user.

One common feature of military command centers is a display switching system, so that anybody in the room can look at anybody else's screen. NASA also does this. When something important is happening at one station, others can look at it without people running around standing behind someone else.

Today we could easily do more of this. Meeting rooms should be set up for this. But they're not, even when they have a big screen.

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