(January/February 2000 Issue Vol 103 No. 1 Pg. 66) has an interesting article entitled "Computing's Johnny Appleseed" on J.C.R. Licklider. It discusses his interest in "Man-Machine Symbiosis" and how that relates to his stint at DARPA providing funding for people including Doug Engelbart. The article provides an interesting perspective on the early history of computing.

It is available online here:

There is a long list of the people and labs "Lick" directed money to around 1962, including all the big computer science names today -- Stanford, Berkley, MIT, CMU . One part reads: "Lick had also taken a chance on a soft-spoken visionary he barely knew - Douglas Engelbart of SRI International - whose ideas on augmenting the human intellect with computers closely resembled his own and who had been thoroughly ignored by his colleagues. With funding from Lick and eventually from NASA as well, Engelbart would go on to develop the mouse, hypertext, on-screen windows, and many other features of modern software."

I found particularly interesting the discussion of Lick's work in the 1950s on "SAGE", a real-time computing system for air defense, and how it reflected the first major experience of how humans and machines could work together.

A related link which includes a paper by Lick:

Sincerely,

Kurtz-Fernhout Software

Paul Fernhout
pdfernhout@kurtz-fernhout.com
Developers of custom software and educational simulations
Creators of the Garden with Insight(TM) garden simulator
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com

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