Other articles in the series:
- History of the relay
- History of electronic computers
- History of the transistor
- Internet history
In the early 1960s, interactive computers started out as tender sprouts nurtured in the Lincoln and MIT labs and gradually spread everywhere, in two different ways. First, the computers themselves stretched out their tendrils that reached neighboring buildings, campuses and cities, which allowed users to interact with them from a distance, and several users at the same time. These new time-sharing systems flourished, eventually becoming platforms for the first virtual, online communities. Second, the seeds of interactivity spread throughout the states and took root in California. And one person was responsible for this first seedling, a psychologist named .
Joseph "apple seed"*
*Allusion to the American folklore character nicknamed , or "Johnny apple seed", famous for the active seating of apple trees in the Midwest of the USA (apple seed - apple seed) / approx. transl.
Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider - for friends "Lick" - specialized in , an area that connected imaginary states of consciousness, the psychology measured by instruments and the physics of sound. We mentioned him in passing earlier - he was a consultant at the FCC hearings on Hush-a-Phone in the 1950s. He honed his skills at the Harvard Psychoacoustic Laboratory during the war, developing technologies that improved the audibility of radio transmissions in noisy bombers.
Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider aka Lick
Like many American scientists of his generation, he found ways to combine his interests with military needs after the war, but not because he was very interested in weapons or national defense. There were only two major civilian sources of research funding - they were private institutions founded by industrial giants at the turn of the century: the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institution. The National Institutes of Health had only a few million dollars, and the National Science Foundation was founded only in 1950, and had an equally modest budget. In the 1950s, the best way to get funding for interesting science and technology projects was to rely on the Department of Defense.
So in the 1950s, Leek joined the MIT Acoustics Laboratory, run by physicists Leo Beranek and Richard Bolt, and receiving almost all of its funding from the US Navy. After that, his experience of connecting the human senses with electronic equipment made him the first candidate for a new air defense project from MIT. Participating in the development team“who was responsible for the implementation of the Valley Committee Air Defense Report, Leak insisted on being included in the human factors research project, as a result of which he was appointed one of the directors of radar display development at the Lincoln Lab.
There, at some point in the mid-1950s, he crossed paths with Wes Clark and the TX-2, and was immediately infected with computer interactivity. He was fascinated by the idea of complete control over a powerful machine capable of instantly solving any task assigned to it. He began to develop the idea of creating a "symbiosis of man and machine", a partnership between man and computer that could enhance the intellectual power of a person in the same way that industrial machines enhance his physical abilities (it is worth noting that Lick considered this stage to be intermediate, and that subsequently computers will learn to think on one's own). He noticed that 85% of his working time
... was devoted mainly to clerical or mechanical activities: searching, calculating, drawing, transforming, determining the logical or dynamic consequences of a set of assumptions or hypotheses, preparing for a decision. Moreover, my choices of what to try and what not to try were shamefully determined by arguments of clerical ability rather than intellectual ability. Operations that take up most of the time supposedly devoted to technical thinking, machines could perform better than people.
The general concept did not go far from that described by Vanivar Bush "', an intelligent amplifier, which he sketched out in 1945 in As We May Think, although instead of Bush's mixture of electromechanical and electronic components, we have come to purely electronic digital computers. Such a computer would use its incredible speed to help with office work related to any scientific or engineering project. People could get rid of this monotonous work and devote all their attention to forming hypotheses, building models and assigning goals to the computer. Such a partnership would provide incredible benefits to both researchers and national defense, and would help American scientists outpace the Soviets.
"Memex" by Vanivar Bush, an early concept for an automatic information extraction system that augments intelligence
Shortly after this landmark meeting, Leek brought his passion for interactive computing with him to a new job at a consulting firm run by his old colleagues, Bolt and Beranek. They worked as consultants for years in parallel to their academic work in physics; for example, they studied the acoustics of a movie theater in Hoboken, New Jersey. Taking on the task of analyzing the acoustics of the new United Nations building in New York City got them a lot of work, so they decided to leave MIT and do consulting full-time. They were soon joined by a third partner, architect Robert Newman, and named themselves Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN). By 1957 they had grown to a medium-sized firm with a few dozen employees, and Beranek decided they were in danger of saturating the acoustic research market. He wanted to expand the firm's expertise beyond sound to encompass the entire spectrum of human interaction with the built environment, from concert halls to automobiles, and across the senses.
And he, of course, sought out an old colleague of Licklider's, and hired him on generous terms as the new vice president of psychoacoustics. However, Beranek did not take into account Leek's wild enthusiasm for interactive computing. Instead of a psychoacoustics expert, he got not quite a computer expert, but a computer preacher who was eager to open the eyes of others. Over the course of a year, he convinced Beranek to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to buy a computer, a small, weak LGP-30 device made by DoD contractor Librascope. With no engineering background, he brought in another SAGE veteran, Edward Fredkin, to help set up the machine. Despite the fact that the computer mainly distracted Lik from his main job while he tried to learn to program, after a year and a half he convinced partners to spend more money ($ 150, which is about $ 000 million in today's money) to buy a more powerful Computer: DEC's latest PDP-1,25. Leek convinced BBN that digital computing was the future and that somehow, someday, their investment in expertise in the field would pay off.
Shortly thereafter, Leek almost accidentally found himself in a position ideal for spreading a culture of interactivity throughout the country, becoming head of a new government computing agency.
HARP
During the Cold War, every action had a reaction. As the first Soviet atomic bomb led to the creation of SAGE, so , launched by the USSR in October 1957, gave rise to a flurry of reactions in the American government. The situation was aggravated by the fact that although the USSR was four years behind the United States on the issue of detonating a nuclear bomb, in rocket science it made a leap forward, overtaking the Americans in the race to orbit (it turned out to be about four months).
One response to the advent of Sputnik 1 in 1958 was the creation of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). In contrast to the modest amounts given to civilian science, ARPA received a $520 million budget, three times the funding from the National Science Foundation, which was itself tripled in response to the advent of Sputnik 1.
Although the Office could work on a wide range of any cutting-edge projects that the Secretary of Defense saw fit, it was originally intended to focus on rocket science and space - such was the strong response to Sputnik 1. ARPA reported directly to the Secretary of Defense, and thus was able to rise above the counterproductive and industry-damaging rivalry by developing a single, sensible plan for the development of the American space program. However, in reality, all his projects in this area were soon taken over by rivals: the Air Force was not going to give control over military rocket science, and the national law on aeronautics and space, signed in July 1958, created a new civilian agency that took over all issues related to space, not touching weapons. However, after the creation of ARPA, it found reasons to survive, as it received large research projects in the areas of defense against ballistic missiles and the detection of nuclear tests. However, it also became a working platform for small projects that various military agencies were willing to explore. So instead of a dog, control became a tail.
The last selected project was "“, a spacecraft with a nuclear pulse engine (“explosion”). ARPA stopped funding it in 1959 because it could not imagine it being anything other than a purely civilian project that fell under the purview of NASA. In turn, NASA did not want to sully its purest reputation by getting involved in nuclear weapons. The Air Force reluctantly threw in some money to keep the project going, but it ended up dying after a 1963 agreement banning nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere or space. While this idea was technically very interesting, it's hard to imagine any government giving the green light to launching a rocket filled with thousands of nuclear bombs.
ARPA's first foray into computers was simply out of a need for something to occupy control. In 1961, the Air Force had two dormant assets on hand that needed to be loaded with something. As the Air Force approached the deployment of the first SAGE detection centers, the RAND Corporation of Santa Monica, California was enlisted to train personnel and equip the twenty-odd computerized air defense centers with control programs. For this work, RAND spawned a whole new entity, the Systems Development Corporation (SDC). The software experience gained by the SDC proved valuable to the Air Force, but the SAGE project was ending, and they had nothing to do. The second dormant asset was a hugely expensive spare AN/FSQ-32 computer that was requisitioned from IBM for the SAGE project but later deemed redundant. The Department of Defense solved both problems by giving ARPA a new command center research task and promised a $6 million grant for SDC to study command center problems with the Q-32.
ARPA soon decided to regulate this research program as part of a new information processing research division. Around the same time, the agency was given a new assignment to create a program in behavioral science. It is not clear at this time for what exactly, but management decided to hire Licklider as director of both programs. Perhaps it was the idea of Gene Fubini, director of research at the Defense Department, who knew Leek from his work on SAGE.
Like Beranek in his time, Jack Ruina, who was then in charge of ARPA, had no idea what was in store for him when he invited Lik for an interview. He thought he was getting a behavioral expert with some knowledge of computer science. Instead, he faced the full power of the ideas of human-computer symbiosis. Leak argued that a computerized control center would require interactive computers, and therefore the main driver of the ARPA research program should be a breakthrough at the forefront of interactive computing. And for Lik, this meant the division of time.
Time division
Time-sharing systems began on the same basic principle as Wes Clark's TX series: computers should be user-friendly. But, unlike Clark, time-sharing advocates believed that one person could not efficiently use an entire computer. The researcher can sit for several minutes, studying the output of the program, before making a small change to it and running it again. And in this interval, the computer will have nothing to do, its greatest power will be idle, and it will cost a lot. Even the intervals between keystrokes of hundreds of milliseconds seemed like vast abysses of wasted computer time, in which thousands of calculations could be performed.
All this computing power may not be wasted if it can be divided among many users. By dividing the attention of the computer so that it serves each user in turn, the computer designer could kill two birds with one stone—providing the illusion of an interactive computer that is entirely under the control of the user without wasting much of the processing capacity of expensive hardware.
This concept was laid down in SAGE, which could serve dozens of different operators at the same time, and each of them tracked its own sector of airspace. Upon meeting Clark, Leek immediately saw the potential of combining the separation of users in SAGE with the interactive freedom of the TX-0 and TX-2 to create a new, powerful blend, which formed the basis of his advocacy of human-computer symbiosis, which he presented to the Department of Defense in a 1957 paper " A Truly Wise System, or Forward to Machine/Human Hybrid Thinking Systems. - sage / approx. transl.]. In this paper, he described a computer system for scientists very similar to SAGE in structure, with light gun input, and "simultaneous use (with rapid time division) of the machine's computational and information storage capabilities by many people."
However, Leek himself did not have the engineering skills to design or build such a system. He learned the basics of programming from BBN, but that was his limit. The first person to put the theory of time sharing into practice was John McCarthy, a mathematician at MIT. McCarthy needed constant access to a computer to create tools and models for manipulating mathematical logic - in his opinion, the first steps towards artificial intelligence. In 1959, he built a prototype that consisted of an interactive module bolted to a university IBM 704 batch computer. Ironically, the first "time-sharing device" had only one interactive console, the Flexowriter teletypewriter.
But by the early 1960s, MIT's engineering department came to the need for active investment in interactive computing. Every student and teacher who was interested in programming sat down on computers. Batch data processing was very efficient in using computer time, but wasted a lot of researcher time - the average processing time for a task on the 704 was more than a day.
To explore long-term plans to meet the growing demands for computing resources at MIT, a university committee dominated by time-sharing advocates was organized. Clark argued that the transition to interactivity does not mean time sharing. From a practical standpoint, he said, time-sharing meant abandoning interactive video displays and real-time interaction, critical aspects of a project he worked on at the MIT biophysics lab. But on a more fundamental level, Clark seemed to have a deep philosophical rejection of the idea of sharing his workspace. Until 1990, he refused to connect his computer to the Internet, stating that networks are a "bug" and they "do not work."
He and his students formed a "sub-culture", a tiny offshoot within the already eccentric academic culture of interactive computers. However, their arguments in favor of small workstations that do not need to be shared with anyone did not convince their colleagues. Considering the cost of even the smallest single computer at the time, this approach seemed economically unsound to other engineers. In addition, most at the time believed that computers, the smart power plants of the coming information age, would benefit from economies of scale, just as power plants did. In the spring of 1961, the committee's final report authorized the creation of large time-sharing systems as part of the development of MIT.
By then, Fernando Corbato, "Corby" to his colleagues, was already working on scaling up McCarthy's experiment. He was a physicist by training, and learned about computers while working at Whirlwind in 1951, while still an MIT graduate student (the only survivor of all the participants in this story - in January 2019 he was 92). After completing his doctorate, he became an administrator at MIT's newly formed IBM 704 computing center. Corbato and his team (originally Marge Mervin and Bob Daly, two of the center's top programmers) called their time-sharing system CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System, " compatible time-sharing system") because it could run simultaneously with the 704's normal workflow, automatically picking up computer cycles for users as needed. Without such interoperability, the project would not have been able to work, because Corby did not have the funding to buy a new computer on which to build a time-sharing system from scratch, and it was impossible to stop existing batch processing operations.
By the end of 1961, CTSS could support four terminals. By 1963, MIT had placed two copies of the CTSS on IBM 7094 transistorized machines, each costing $3,5 million, about 10 times the memory and processor power of the previous 704s. The control software cycled through the active users, serving each one for a fraction of a second and then moving on to the next one. Users could save programs and data for later use in their own password-protected area of disk storage.
Corbato in his trademark bow tie in the computer room with the IBM 7094
Corby explains how time-sharing works, involving a two-level queue, in a 1963 telecast
Each computer could serve approximately 20 terminals. This was enough not only to support a couple of small terminal rooms, but also to distribute computer access throughout Cambridge. Corby and other key engineers had their own terminals in the office, and at some point, MIT began providing home terminals for technicians so they could work on the system after hours without having to travel to work. All early terminals consisted of a converted typewriter capable of reading data and giving it out over a telephone line, and continuous feed perforated paper. The modems connected the terminals by telephone to a private switchboard on the MIT campus through which they could connect to the CTSS computer. The computer thus lengthened its senses through the phone and the signals turned from digital to analog and vice versa. This was the first stage in the integration of computers with the telecommunications network. Integration was facilitated by the ambiguous state of AT&T in terms of regulatory rules. The backbone of the network was still regulated and the company was required to provide leased lines at fixed rates, but several FCC rulings diluted the company's control over the periphery, and the latter had little objection to connecting various devices to its lines. Therefore, MIT did not need permission for terminals.
Typical computer terminal from the mid-1960s: IBM 2741.
The ultimate goal of Licklider, McCarthy, and Corbato was to increase the availability of computing power to individual researchers. They chose the means and time sharing for economic reasons: no one could have imagined that every researcher at MIT would have their own computer. However, this choice led to unintended side effects that could not be grasped in Clark's "one person, one computer" paradigm. A shared file system and cross-references to user accounts allowed them to share, work collaboratively, and complement each other's work. In 1965, Noel Morris and Tom van Vleck accelerated collaboration and communication by creating the MAIL program, which allowed users to exchange messages. When a user sent a message, the program assigned it to a special mailbox file in the recipient's file area. If this file was not empty, the LOGIN program displayed the message "YOU HAVE MAIL". The contents of the machine became an expression of the actions of the user community, and this social aspect of time-sharing came to be valued at MIT as highly as the original idea of using the computer interactively.
Abandoned seeds
Leak, after accepting an offer from ARPA and leaving BBN to head ARPA's new division, the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) in 1962, quickly did what he promised: focusing the company's computing research efforts on dissemination and improvement. hardware and software for time sharing. He abandoned the usual practice of processing research proposals that were supposed to come to his desk, and went into the "fields" himself, inciting engineers to create research proposals that he wanted to approve.
His first step was to reconfigure the existing Santa Monica SDC command center research project. From Lick's office at SDC came the command to scale down efforts to direct this research and focus it on turning the surplus SAGE computer into a time-sharing system. Lick believed that the foundation should first be laid in the form of time-sharing human-machine interaction, and command centers would appear later. That this prioritization coincided with his philosophical interests was only a happy accident. Jules Schwartz, a veteran of the SAGE project, was developing a new time-sharing system. Like its contemporary CTSS, it became a virtual meeting place, and among its commands was the DIAL function for sending private text messages from one user to another - as in the following example of an exchange between Jon Jones and a user with id equal to 9.
DIAL 9 THIS IS JOHN JONES, I NEED 20K IN ORDER TO LOAD MY PROG
FROM 9 WE CAN GET YOU ON IN 5 MINUTES.
FROM 9 GO AHEAD AND LOAD
DIAL 9 THIS IS JOHN JONES I NEED 20K TO RUN THE PROG
FROM 9 WE CAN GIVE THEM TO YOU IN 5 MINUTES
FROM 9 GO RUN
Then, to secure funding for future time-sharing projects at MIT, Licklider found Robert Fano to lead his flagship project: Project MAC, which survived into the 1970s. , “cognition with the help of a machine” [Mathematics And Computation, Multiple-Access Computer, Machine-Aided Cognition]). Although the developers hoped that the new system could support at least 200 concurrent users, they did not take into account the ever-increasing complexity of user software, which easily absorbed all the improvements in hardware speed and efficiency. When launched at MIT in 1969, the system could support about 60 users on its two CPUs, roughly equal to the number of users per CPU for CTSS. However, the total number of users was much greater than the maximum possible load - in June 1970, 408 users were already registered.
The project's system software, called Multics, boasted some major improvements, some of which are still considered state-of-the-art in today's operating systems: a hierarchical tree structure file system with folders that can contain other folders; separation of command executions from the user and from the system at the hardware level; dynamic linking of programs with loading of program modules during execution as needed; the ability to add or remove CPUs, memory banks, or disks without shutting down the system. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, programmers on the Multics project, later created the Unix operating system (which refers to its predecessor) to port some of these concepts to simpler and smaller computer systems [The name "UNIX" (originally "Unics") was derived from "Multics". The U in the UNIX name stood for "Uniplexed" ("monosyllabic"), as opposed to the word "Multiplexed" ("complex"), which was the basis of the name of the Multics system, in order to emphasize the attempt of the creators of UNIX to move away from the complexities of the Multics system to develop simpler and more workable approach.].
Lick threw his last seed at Berkeley, at the University of California. Started in 1963, Project Genie12 spawned the Berkeley Timesharing System, a smaller commercial version of Project MAC. Although it was nominally run by several university professors, student Mel Pyrtle actually led the work, and other students helped him - in particular, Chuck Tucker, Peter Deutsch and Butler Lampson. Some of them had already contracted the interactivity virus in Cambridge before they got to Berkeley. Deutsch, the son of an MIT physics professor and a computer prototyping enthusiast, implemented the Lisp programming language on a Digital PDP-1 as a teenager before he was a student at Berkeley. Lampson programmed the PDP-1 at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator while a student at Harvard. Pyrtle and his team built a time-sharing system on the SDS 930 built by Scientific Data Systems, a new computer company founded in Santa Monica in 1961 contributions to advanced computer technology in the 1960s were made by the RAND Corporation, SDC, and SDS, which were headquartered there).
SDS integrated software from Berkeley into its new project, the SDS 940. It became one of the most popular time-sharing computer systems in the late 1960s. Tymshare and Comshare, which commercialized time-sharing by selling remote computing services, bought dozens of SDS 940s. filed for bankruptcy. Much of Pirtle's team ended up at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where Tucker, Deutsch, and Lampson contributed to landmark projects that included the Alto personal workstation, local area networking, and a laser printer.
Mel Pyrtle (center) next to the Berkeley Timesharing System
Of course, not every time-sharing project from the 1960s was created thanks to Licklider. News about what was happening at MIT and Lincoln Labs was spread through technical literature, conferences, academic contacts, and employee transfers from one job to another. Through these channels, other seeds, drawn by the wind, took root. At the University of Illinois, Don Bitzer sold his PLATO system to the Department of Defense, which was supposed to reduce the cost of technical training for military personnel. Clifford Shaw created the JOHNNIAC Open Shop System (JOSS), funded by the Air Force, designed to improve the ability of RAND employees to quickly perform numerical analysis. The Dartmouth time-sharing system was directly related to what was happening at MIT, but otherwise it was a completely unique project, funded exclusively by civilians from the National Science Foundation under the assumption that computer experience would become a necessary part of the education of US leaders next generation.
By the mid-1960s, time-sharing had not yet completely taken over the computing ecosystem. Traditional batch processing businesses have dominated both in sales and popularity, especially outside university campuses. But it still found its niche.
Taylor's office
In the summer of 1964, about two years after arriving at ARPA, Licklider changed jobs again, this time moving to an IBM research center north of New York. Shocked by the loss of his Project MAC contract to rival computer maker General Electric after years of good relations with MIT, Leak had to share his first-hand experience with IBM about a trend that seemed to be passing the company by. For Lick, the new job offered an opportunity to turn the last bastion of familiar batch processing into a new faith of interactivity (but it didn’t work out—Lick was relegated to the background, and his wife suffered, being isolated in the wilderness in Yorktown Heights. He transferred to IBM’s Cambridge office, and then returned to MIT in 1967 to head Project MAC).
He was succeeded as head of the IPTO by Ivan Sutherland, a young computer graphics expert, who was in turn replaced by Robert Taylor in 1966. Lick's 1960 work "The Symbiosis of Man and Machine" turned Taylor into a fan of interactive computers, and on Lick's recommendation, he came to ARPA after doing some research work at NASA. His personality and experience made him more like Leek than Sutherland. A psychologist by training, with no technical knowledge of computers, he compensated for their lack of enthusiasm and confident leadership.
One day, while Taylor was in his office, the newly appointed head of IPTO had an idea. He sat at a desk with three different terminals that allowed him to connect to three ARPA-funded time-sharing systems located in Cambridge, Berkeley, and Santa Monica. At the same time, they were not connected with each other - in order to transfer information from one system to another, he had to do it himself, physically, using his body and mind.
The seeds thrown by Licklider have borne fruit. He created a social community of IPTO employees that grew into many other computer centers, each of which formed a small community of computer experts gathered around a time-sharing computer hearth. Taylor thought it was time to link these centers together. Their separate social and technical structures, when linked together, could form a kind of super-organism whose rhizomes would spread across the continent, reproducing the social benefits of time-sharing on a higher scale. And with that thought began the technical and political duels that led to the creation of ARPANET.
What else to read
- Richard J. Barber Associates, The Advanced Research Projects Agency, 1958-1974 (1975)
- Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (1996)
- Severo M. Ornstein, Computing in the Middle Ages: A View From the Trenches, 1955-1983 (2002)
- M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: JCR Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (2001)
Source: habr.com