Where Wizards Stay Up Late (4 page)

Based on a large IBM computer, SAGE was so mammoth that its operators and technicians literally walked inside the machine. The system served three major functions: receiving data from various detection and tracking radars, interpreting data relating to unidentified aircraft, and pointing defensive weapons at incoming hostile aircraft. SAGE was only “semiautomatic,” since the human operator remained an important part of the system. In fact, SAGE was one of the first fully operational, real-time interactive computer systems. Operators communicated with the computer through displays, keyboards, switches, and light guns. Users could request information from the computer and receive an answer within a few seconds. New information continuously flowed directly into the computer's memory through telephone lines to the users, making it immediately available to the operators.

The SAGE system inspired a few thinkers, including Licklider, to see computing in an entirely new light. SAGE was an early example of what Licklider would later call the “symbiosis” between humans and machines, where the machine functions as a problem-solving partner. Implied in this symbiotic relationship was the interdependency of humans and computers working in unison as a single system. For instance, in a battle scenario, human operators without computers would be unable to calculate and analyze threats quickly enough to counter an attack. Conversely, computers working alone would be unable to make crucial decisions.

In 1953 MIT decided to start a human factors group in the psychology section of the economics department, and Lick was put in charge. He recruited a handful of his brightest students and colleagues. Lick hired people based not on their doctoral work or class standing but on a simple test he applied: the Miller Analogies Test. (The test covers every field from geology to history and the arts. It requires both good general knowledge and an ability to apply that knowledge to relationships.) “I had a kind of a rule,” he said. “Anybody who could do 85 or better on the Miller Analogies Test, hire him, because he's going to be very good at something.”

In 1954 Lick's group moved in with the social psychologists and labor-management experts in the Sloan School of Management. But the group's ideas were far removed from management problems. As McGill, an early Licklider recruit, described it, he and his peers were far more interested in computers and computer memory devices as models for the versatility of human cognition. The first dissertation produced by the department under Lick's guidance came from Ph.D. candidate Tom Marill, who had examined the subject of ideal auditory detection. (Like others who came into Licklider's sphere, Marill would make his mark on the development of computer networking in years to come.) “Nothing like this had ever been seen before, at least not in a psychology department,” said McGill. The department was the first cognitive science department in history. “The work was experimentally based cognitive psychology, as it would be defined today, but at the time we had no proper language or nomenclature.”

But eventually MIT administrators wanted something more traditional, and Lick failed in his efforts to expand his new department with permanent appointments. As a result, all his protégés, young and marketable, drifted off. “We did not have the sophistication to promote what we did, and we were unaware that there was anything unique about it. So MIT let it all slip away,” McGill said. Lick was a maverick, after all, and a little far-out, perhaps too much so for MIT.

Yet Lick did not lament the demise of the group, for he had a self-professed short attention span. His interests changed often and dramatically over the years. He once advised a young friend never to sign on for a project that lasted more than five to seven years, so he could always move on to other things. And anything Lick got interested in, he plunged into in great depth.

Perhaps the incident that most piqued Lick's interest in computers and their potential as interactive instruments was an encounter he had in the 1950s with a smart, opinionated young engineer at Lincoln Labs named Wesley Clark. Clark was a young researcher working on the TX-2 machine, the state of the art in digital computation and the successor to a computer called the TX-0. Clark had built the TX-0 with Ken Olsen before Olsen left to start Digital Equipment Corporation.

Clark's office was in the Lincoln basement. One day, on his way back from the stockroom at the other end of the corridor, Clark decided to venture into a room that had always seemed vaguely off-limits. Most lab doors stood open, but not this one. It was always closed. Clark tried the door, which he was surprised to find unlocked, and entered the room. “I wandered in and back through a little labyrinth of baffles and barriers,” Clark recalled. “Off to one side was this very dark laboratory and I went in, and after probing around in the dark for a while I found this man sitting in front of some displays. He was doing some kind of psychometrics, and he was clearly an interesting fellow. I got interested in what he was doing and in his apparatus, and as I recall I suggested to him that he could achieve the same results by using a computer.” The man was Licklider. Clark invited Lick to come down the hall to see the TX-2 and learn some fundamentals.

Teaching Lick actually to program the machine would have been too difficult. Programming a computer like the TX-2 was something of a black art. The TX-2, which contained 64,000 bytes of memory (as much as a simple handheld calculator today), took up a couple of rooms. What many years later became tiny microchips for the computer's central processing unit were, in those days, huge racks of many separate plug-in units, each consisting of dozens of transistors and associated electronic parts. Still more space was taken up with large consoles covered with switches and indicator lights to help the operator or troubleshooter understand what the system was doing. All of this equipment required rack upon rack of gear, only a tiny fraction of which—the video display screen and keyboard—might be recognizable today as ordinary computer parts. “To sit at the TX-2 with Lick was to be embedded in a welter of seemingly irrelevant stuff,” Clark said. To become a TX-2 “user” would have been a daunting exercise even for someone as quick as Licklider. For one thing, there were no teaching tools per se, no instructional aids or help menus. For another, the operating system, which would standardize programming for the machine, had yet to be written.

One thing the TX-2 did do very well was display information on video screens. That made it one of the earliest machines for interactive graphics work. It was this feature that helped Clark demonstrate for Lick the main ideas of interactive use.

The sessions with Clark made an indelible impression on Lick. He drifted further from psychology and toward computer science. As his interests changed, Lick's belief in the potential for computers to transform society became something of an obsession. Succumbing to the lure of computing, he began spending hours at a time at the interactive display console. Louise believed that if he weren't being paid for this work, he'd have paid to do it.

The idea on which Lick's worldview pivoted was that technological progress would save humanity. The political process was a favorite example of his. In a McLuhanesque view of the power of electronic media, Lick saw a future in which, thanks in large part to the reach of computers, most citizens would be “informed about, and interested in, and involved in, the process of government.” He imagined what he called “home computer consoles” and television sets linked together in a massive network. “The political process,” he wrote, “would essentially be a giant teleconference, and a campaign would be a months-long series of communications among candidates, propagandists, commentators, political action groups, and voters. The key is the self-motivating exhilaration that accompanies truly effective interaction with information through a good console and a good network to a good computer.”

Lick's thoughts about the role computers could play in people's lives hit a crescendo in 1960 with the publication of his seminal paper “Man-Computer Symbiosis.” In it he distilled many of his ideas into a central thesis: A close coupling between humans and “the electronic members of the partnership” would eventually result in cooperative decision making. Moreover, decisions would be made by humans, using computers, without what Lick called “inflexible dependence on predetermined programs.” He held to the view that computers would naturally continue to be used for what they do best: all of the rote work. And this would free humans to devote energy to making better decisions and developing clearer insights than they would be capable of without computers. Together, Lick suggested, man and machine would perform far more competently than either could alone. Moreover, attacking problems in partnership with computers could save the most valuable of postmodern resources: time. “The hope,” Licklider wrote, “is that in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled . . . tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.”

Licklider's ideas, which had their beginnings just a few years earlier in a chance encounter in the basement of Lincoln Lab, represented some of the most daring and imaginative thinking of the day. One former MIT student, Robert Rosin, who had taken an experimental psychology course from Lick in 1956 and later went into computer science, read “Man-Computer Symbiosis” and was awestruck by the elder's intellectual versatility. “For the life of me, I could not imagine how a psychologist who, in 1956, had no apparent knowledge of computers, could have written such a profound and insightful paper about ‘my field' in 1960,” Rosin said. “Lick's paper made a deep impression on me and refined my own realization that a new age of computing was upon us.”

In the moment that Licklider published the paper, his reputation as a computer scientist was fixed forever. He shed the mantle of psychology and took on computing. There was no turning him back. A couple of years before the paper was published, Licklider had left MIT to work at a small consulting and research firm in Cambridge called Bolt Beranek and Newman. The company had agreed to buy him two computers for his research, and he was having the time of his life.

One day in 1962, ARPA director Jack Ruina called Licklider with a new job possibility. What would Lick say to taking on not just ARPA's command and control division, but a new behavioral sciences division as well? And there'd be a huge computer, the Q-32, thrown into the deal.

Ruina also called on Fred Frick, a friend and colleague of Lick's at Lincoln Lab. Frick and Licklider met with Ruina together. Licklider went in prepared just to listen but was soon waxing eloquent on the topic. The problems of command and control, he told Ruina, were essentially problems of human-computer interaction. “I thought it was just ridiculous to be having command and control systems based on batch processing,” he recalled years later. “Who can direct a battle when he's got to write the program in the middle of the battle?” Licklider and Frick agreed that the job seemed interesting, but neither wanted to leave what he was doing.

Ruina's sales pitch was so intense, however, and he made the mission seem so critical, that Frick and Licklider decided one of them should do it. They tossed a coin, and Lick accepted the position on the condition that he be given the freedom to lead the program in any direction he saw fit. Partly because Ruina was very busy, and partly because he didn't understand computers himself, he agreed to the proviso without hesitation.

Lick belonged to a small group of computer scientists who believed that people could be much more effective if they had at their fingertips a computer system with good displays and good databases. Before moving to Washington in the fall of 1962, Lick gave a series of computer seminars at the Pentagon, well attended by Defense Department and military officials. His message, already something of a mantra up in Cambridge but still largely unfamiliar to a military audience, was that a computer should be something anyone could interact with directly, eliminating computer operators as the middlemen in solving their problems.

To this end, Lick saw great promise in time-sharing and was one of its most ardent evangelists. Time-sharing didn't exactly put a computer on everyone's desk, but it created the illusion of just that. It brought the power of the computer right to everyone's fingertips. It gave people a strong feel for the machine.

The promotion of time-sharing was by no means Lick's sole mission when he arrived at ARPA. He was just as keen on exploring the ideas that had been percolating around human-machine interaction for several years.

When Lick arrived for his first day at work, on October 1, 1962, his secretary said, “Well, Dr. Licklider, you have just one appointment today. There are some gentlemen coming from the Bureau of the Budget to review your program.” When the budget officers arrived, they were amused to discover it was Licklider's first day. There wasn't much of substance to discuss yet. The command and control program consisted of one $9 million contract—with System Development Corporation—and the remaining $5 million or so in the budget was still unassigned. Instead of a budget review, the meeting was transformed into a private colloquium, in which Lick expounded on such topics as time-sharing, interactive computing, and artificial intelligence. Like many others before them, the accountants were infected by Licklider's enthusiasm. “I told them what I was excited about, and that turned out to work greatly to my favor, because they got interested in it,” he said later. “And when we did have a meeting on it, they did not take any of my money away.”