Where Wizards Stay Up Late (3 page)

The relationship between the military and computer establishments began with the modern computer industry itself. During World War II, in the midst of a perceived need for faster calculating ability than could be provided by the banks of mechanical calculators run by human operators, the military funded dozens of computing experiments. The Navy supported Howard Aiken, the Harvard mathematics professor who dreamed of building a large-scale calculator and ended up with the Mark I, a fifty-one-foot-long, eight-foot-tall switchboard that could perform arithmetical operations without the intervention of an operator. The Army also supported the famous Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator (ENIAC) project at the University of Pennsylvania. Later at MIT, first the Navy and then the Air Force supported a computer called Whirlwind.

In the early 1950s computing meant doing arithmetic fast. Companies, especially banks, put their machines to work doing large-scale calculations. In 1953, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), already the country's largest manufacturer of time clocks as well as electromechnical tabulating equipment, jumped into the business of making large electronic computers. These were business machines of the future. The IBM machines weren't necessarily better than the Univac (the successor to the ENIAC), but IBM's sales staff became legendary, and before too long sales of IBM's machines had surpassed those of the Univac.

Then, in the late 1950s, just as IBM was passing the billion-dollar-sales mark, Ken Olsen, an individualistic and outspoken engineer, left MIT's Lincoln Laboratory with $70,000 in venture capital to exploit commercially the technology developed around a new machine: the TX-2 at Lincoln Lab. He formed the Digital Equipment Corporation to manufacture and sell computer components, and then he built something radically different from what had existed before: a smaller computer called a minicomputer that interacted directly with the user. Olsen's idea for an interactive computer had come from a pioneering group of computer researchers at MIT. A different, slightly younger group there came up with another dramatic concept in computing that was beginning to catch on, particularly in academic institutions. They called it “time-sharing,” and it had obvious appeal as an alternative to the slow and awkward traditional method of “batch” processing.

Batch processing was a cumbersome way of computing. For even the smallest programming task, it was necessary to have the relevant code punched onto program cards, which were then combined with “control cards” to take care of the computer's administrative functions. A computer operator fed the cards into the computer or onto magnetic tape for processing, one batch at a time. Depending on the length of the queue and the complexity of the programs and problems, the wait could be long. It was not unusual to wait a day or longer for results.

Time-sharing was, as the term suggests, a new method of giving many users interactive access to computers from individual terminals. The terminals allowed them to interact directly with the mainframe computer. The revolutionary aspect of time-sharing was that it eliminated much of the tedious waiting that characterized batch-process computing. Time-sharing gave users terminals that allowed them to interact directly with the computer and obtain their results immediately. “We really believed that it was a better way to operate,” recalled Fernando Corbató, an MIT computer scientist. “I suppose if somebody had said, ‘I will give you a free machine,' we might have said, ‘We do not need time-sharing.'” But computers in those days were huge things. They took up large rooms and required continual maintenance because there were so many components. “They were just not a casual thing,” Corbató went on. “You did not normally think of having a personal machine in those days—exclusive use maybe, but not a personal one. So we really saw a need to try to change that. We were frustrated.” The appreciation of time-sharing was directly proportional to the amount of direct access one had to the computer. And usually that meant that the more you programmed, the better you understood the value of direct access.

What time-sharing could not do was eliminate the necessity of coordinating competing demands on the machine by different users. By its nature, time-sharing encouraged users to work as if they had the entire machine at their command, when in fact they had only a fraction of the total computing power. Distribution of costs among a number of users meant that the more users the better. Of course, too many users bogged down the machine, since a high percentage of the machine's resources were allocated to coordinating the commands of multiple users. As the number of users increased, more of the computer's resources were dedicated to the coordination function, which reduced actual usable processing time. If programmers had to do very small jobs (such as tightening code or minor debugging of a program), they didn't need a powerful machine. But when it came time to run the programs in full, many of which used a lot of machine resources, it became apparent that users were still in competition with one another for computing time. As soon as a large program requiring a lot of calculations entered the mix of jobs being done on-line, everyone's work slowed down.

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When the Air Force passed the Q-32 on to ARPA in 1961, Ruina didn't have anyone to administer the contract. Ruina had in mind a job with the potential for expansion far beyond the single contract that happened to be pressing at the moment: Computers, as they related to command and control, might one day provide high-speed, reliable information upon which to base critical military decisions. That potential, largely unfulfilled, seemed endlessly promising.

Coincidentally, Ruina also was looking for someone who could direct a new program in behavioral sciences that DOD wanted ARPA to run. By the fall of 1962, Ruina had found the candidate who could fill both posts, an eminent psychologist named J. C. R. Licklider.

Licklider was an obvious choice to head a behavioral sciences office, but a psychologist wasn't an obvious choice to oversee a government office focused on developing leading-edge computer technology. Yet Licklider's broad, interdisciplinary interests suited him well for the job. Licklider had done some serious dabbling in computers. “He used to tell me how he liked to spend a lot of time at a computer console,” Ruina recalled. “He said he would get hung up on it and become sort of addicted.” Licklider was far more than just a computer enthusiast, however. For several years, he had been touting a radical and visionary notion: that computers weren't just adding machines. Computers had the potential to act as extensions of the whole human being, as tools that could amplify the range of human intelligence and expand the reach of our analytical powers.

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider was born in St. Louis in 1915. An only and much-beloved child, he spent his early years nurturing a fascination with model airplanes. He knew he wanted to be a scientist, but he was unfocused through most of his college days at Washington University. He switched concentrations several times, from chemistry to physics to the fine arts and, finally, to psychology. When he graduated in 1937 he held undergraduate degrees in psychology, mathematics, and physics. For a master's thesis in psychology, he decided to test the popular slogan “Get more sleep, it's good for you” on a population of rats. As he approached his Ph.D., Licklider's interests narrowed toward psychoacoustics, the psychophysiology of the auditory system.

For his doctoral dissertation, Licklider studied the auditory cortex of cats, and when he moved to Swarthmore College, he worked on the puzzle of sound localization, attempting to analyze the brain's ability to determine a sound's distance and direction. If you close your eyes and ask someone to snap his fingers, your brain will tell you approximately where the snap is coming from and how far away it is. The puzzle of sound localization is also illustrated by the “cocktail party” phenomenon: In a crowded room where several conversations are taking place within one's hearing range, it is possible to isolate whatever conversation one chooses by tuning in certain voices and tuning out the rest.

In 1942 Licklider went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to work as a research associate in Harvard University's Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory. During the war years, he studied the effects of high altitude on speech communication and the effects of static and other noise on reception by radio receivers. Licklider conducted experiments in B-17 and B-24 bombers at 35,000 feet. The aircraft weren't pressurized, and the temperatures on board were often well below freezing. During one field test, Licklider's colleague and best friend, Karl Kryter, saw Licklider turn white. Kryter panicked. He turned up the oxygen and yelled to his friend, “Lick! Speak to me!” Just as Kryter was about to ask the pilot to descend, the color returned to Licklider's face. He had been in tremendous pain, he said, but it had passed. After that, he stopped partaking of his favorite breakfast—Coca-Cola—before going on high-altitude missions.

By this time, Licklider had joined the Harvard faculty and was gaining recognition as one of the world's leading theorists on the nature of the auditory nervous system, which he once described as “the product of a superb architect and a sloppy workman.”

Psychology at Harvard in those years was strongly influenced by the behaviorist B. F. Skinner and others who held that all behavior is learned, that animals are born as blank slates to be enscribed by chance, experience, and conditioning. When Skinner went so far as to put his own child in a so-called Skinner box to test behaviorist theories and other faculty members began doing similar experiments (albeit less radical ones), Louise Licklider put her foot down. No child of hers was going into a box, and her husband agreed.

Louise was usually the first person to hear her husband's ideas. Nearly every evening after dinner, he returned to work for a few hours, but when he got home at around 11:00
P.M.
he usually spent an hour or so telling Louise his latest thoughts. “I grew up on his ideas,” she said, “from when the seeds were first planted, until somehow or other he saw them bear fruit.”

Everybody adored Licklider and, at his insistence, just about everybody called him “Lick.” His restless, versatile genius gave rise through the years to an eclectic cult of admirers.

Lick stood just over six feet tall. He had sandy brown hair and large blue eyes. His most pronounced characteristic was his soft, down-home Missouri accent, which belied his acute mind. When he gave talks or led colloquia, he never prepared a speech. Instead, he would get up and make extensive remarks off the cuff about a certain problem he happened to be working on. Lick's father had been a Baptist minister, and Louise occasionally chided him by noticing the preacher in him. “Lick at play with a problem at a briefing or a colloquium, speaking in that soft hillbilly accent, was a
tour de force,
” recalled Bill McGill, a former colleague. ”He'd speak in this Missouri Ozark twang, and if you walked in off the street, you'd wonder, Who the hell is this hayseed? But if you were working on the same problem, and listened to his formulation, listening to him would be like seeing the glow of dawn.”

Many of Lick's colleagues were in awe of his problem-solving ability. He was once described as having the world's most refined intuition. “He could see the resolution of a technical problem before the rest of us could calculate it,” said McGill. “This made him rather extraordinary.” Lick was not a formalist in any respect and seldom struggled with arcane theorems. “He was like a wide-eyed child going from problem to problem, consumed with curiosity. Almost every day he had some new fillip on a problem we were thinking about.”

But living with Lick had its frustrations, too. He was humble, many believed, to a fault. He often sat in meetings tossing ideas out for anyone to claim. “If someone stole an idea from him,” Louise recalled, “I'd pound the table and say it's not fair, and he'd say, ‘It doesn't matter who gets the credit; it matters that it gets done.'” Throughout the many years he taught, he inspired all his students, even his undergraduates, to feel like junior colleagues. His house was open to them, and students often showed up at the front door with a chapter of a thesis or just a question for him. ”I'd put my thumb up and they'd pound up to his third-floor office,” said Louise.

In the postwar years, psychology was still a young discipline, inviting derision from those in the harder sciences with little patience for a new field that dealt with such enigmatic entities as the mind, or “the human factor.” But Licklider was a psychologist in the most rigorous sense. As one colleague put it, he belonged with those “whose self-conscious preoccupation with the legitimacy of their scientific activity has made them more tough-minded than a good many of their colleagues in the better established fields.”

By 1950, Lick had moved to MIT to work in the Institute's Acoustics Laboratory. The following year, when MIT created Lincoln Laboratory as a research lab devoted to air defense, Lick signed on to start the laboratory's human-engineering group. The cold war had come to dominate virtually the entire intellectual life of the institution. Lincoln Lab was one of the most visible manifestations of MIT's cold war alliance with Washington.

In the early 1950s many military theoreticians feared a surprise attack by Soviet bombers carrying nuclear weapons over the North Pole. And just as scientists had coalesced during the 1940s to deal with the possibility of German nuclear armament, a similar team gathered in 1951 at MIT to deal with the perceived Soviet threat. Their study was called Project Charles. Its outcome was a proposal to the Air Force for a research facility devoted to the task of creating technology for defense against aerial attack. Thus Lincoln Laboratory was quickly formed, staffed, and set to work under its first director, the physicist Albert Hill. In 1952, the lab moved off-campus to Lexington, about ten miles west of Cambridge. Its main projects centered around the concept of Distant Early Warning—the DEW line: arrays of radars stretching, ideally, from Hawaii to Alaska, across the Canadian archipelago to Greenland, and finally to Iceland and the British Isles. Problems of communication, control, and analysis for such an extended, complex structure could be handled only by a computer. To satisfy that requirement, Lincoln first took on Whirlwind, a computer project at MIT, and then developed a successor project called the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, or SAGE.