Joseph carl robert licklider biography definition sociology

The picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire services. In such a system, the speed of the computers would be balanced, and the cost of the gigantic memories and the sophisticated programs would be divided by the number of users.

Licklider, Man-Computer Symbiosis , He also developed the concepts that led to the idea of the Netizen.

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider. Biography Resource

Licklider started his scientific career as an experimental psychologist and professor at MIT interested in psychoacoustics, the study of how the human ear and brain convert air vibrations into the perception of sound. In response to this revelation, in Licklider spent a day measuring the amount of time it took him to perform the individual tasks of collecting, sorting, and analyzing information and then measured the time it took him to make decisions based on the data once it was collected.

This exercise had a powerful effect and convinced him that one of the most useful long term contributions of computer technology would be to provide automated, extremely fast support systems for human decision making. Most importantly, instead of having to hand over punched cards to an operator and wait days for a printed response from the computer, Licklider could program the PDP-1 directly on paper tape, even stopping it and changing the tape when required, and view the results directly on a display screen in real-time.

The PDP-1 was the first interactive computer. Licklider quickly realized that minicomputers were getting to be powerful enough to support the type of automated library systems that Vannevar Bush had described. Licklider also realized that interactive computers could provide more than a library function, and could provide great value as automated assistants.

He captured his ideas in a seminal paper in called Man-Computer Symbiosis , in which he described a computer assistant that could answer questions, perform simulation modeling, graphically display results, and extrapolate solutions for new situations from past experience. Like Norbert Wiener , Licklider foresaw a close symbiotic relationship between computer and human, including sophisticated computerized interfaces with the brain.

Licklider also quickly appreciated the power of computer networks, and predicted the effects of technological distribution, describing how the spread of computers, programs, and information among a large number of computers connected by a network would create a system more powerful than could be built by any one organization. In , he returned again to lead the IPTO for two years.

In , he was one of the founding members of Infocom. In April , Licklider and Robert Taylor published a ground-breaking paper The Computer as a Communication Device in Science and Technology , portraying the forthcoming universal network as more than a service to provide transmission of data, but also as a tool whose value came from the generation of new information through interaction with its users.