Other articles in the series:
- The History of Relays
- The History of Electronic Computers
- The History of the Transistor
- The History of the Internet
In the early 1960s, interactive computing machines, having begun their journey from the tender seedlings nurtured in the Lincoln and MIT labs, gradually started to spread everywhere, and in two different senses. First, the computers extended their tendrils, reaching neighboring buildings, campuses, and cities, allowing users to interact with them from a distance, with several users simultaneously. These new time-sharing systems flourished, eventually evolving into platforms for the first virtual online communities. Secondly, the seeds of interactivity spread across the states and took root in California. And this first batch was led by one person, a psychologist named .
Joseph "apple seed"*
*A reference to the American folklore character , or "Johnny apple seed," famous for actively planting apple trees throughout the Midwest of the USA (apple seed – яблочное зёрнышко) / translator's note.
Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider – known to friends as "Lick" – specialized in , a field that connected imagined states of consciousness, psychology measured by instruments, and the physics of sound. We briefly mentioned him earlier – he was a consultant at the FCC hearings regarding 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 broadcasts in noisy bombers.
Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, also known as 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 particularly interested in weapons or national defense. There were only two major civilian sources of research funding – these were private institutions founded by industrial giants at the turn of the century: the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institution. National health institutes had only a few million dollars, and the National Science Foundation was established only in 1950, with a similarly modest budget. In the 1950s, to secure funding for interesting scientific and technical projects, it was best to rely on the Department of Defense.
Therefore, in the 1950s, Lick joined the MIT acoustics laboratory, managed by physicists Leo Beranek and Richard Bolt, which received nearly all its funding from the U.S. Navy. After that, his experience in linking human sensory organs with electronic equipment made him the prime candidate for a new air defense project at MIT. Participating in the development group of theproject, which dealt with the implementation of the air defense report by the Wall Committee, Lick insisted on including research into the human factor, resulting in his appointment as one of the directors of radar display development at the Lincoln Laboratory.
There, at some point in the mid-1950s, he crossed paths with Wes Clark and the TX-2, and immediately became fascinated with computer interactivity. He was captivated by the idea of having complete control over a powerful machine capable of solving any task set before it in an instant. He began to develop the idea of creating a 'symbiosis of man and machine,' a partnership between humans and computers that could enhance human intellectual power just as industrial machines amplify his physical capabilities (it is worth noting that Lick considered this stage intermediate, and that subsequently computers would learn to think independently). He noted that 85% of his working time
… was primarily dedicated to clerical or mechanical tasks: searching, computing, drafting, transforming, determining logical or dynamic consequences based on a set of assumptions or hypotheses, preparing for decision-making. Moreover, my choices about what to pursue and what to avoid were shamefully influenced more by the feasibility of office tasks rather than intellectual capability. Operations that consumed a significant portion of the time supposedly devoted to technical contemplation could be performed better by machines than by humans.
The overall concept did not stray far from what Vannevar Bush described as "" – an intellectual amplifier whose blueprint he sketched in 1945 in his book "How We May Think." Although instead of a mix of electromechanical and electronic components like Bush envisioned, we ended up with purely electronic digital computers. Such a computer would leverage its incredible speed to assist with the clerical work involved in any scientific or technical project. People would be able to free themselves from this monotonous work and focus all their attention on formulating hypotheses, building models, and instructing the computer on objectives. This kind of partnership would provide immense advantages for both researchers and national defense, helping American scientists outpace their Soviet counterparts.
Vannevar Bush's "Memex," an early concept of an automatic information retrieval system, augmenting intelligence.
Shortly after this landmark meeting, Lick brought his passion for interactive computers with him to a new job at a consulting firm run by his old colleagues, Bolt and Beranek. They had been consulting part-time while pursuing academic work in physics; for example, they studied theater acoustics in Hoboken (New Jersey). Completing a task for analyzing the acoustics of the new United Nations building in New York brought them a large stream of orders, prompting them toleave MIT and focus on consulting full-time. They were soon joined by a third partner, architect Robert Newman, and they named themselves "Bolt, Beranek, and Newman" (BBN). By 1957, they had grown into a medium-sized firm with several dozen employees, and Beranek decided that they risked saturating the market for acoustic research. He wanted to broaden the firm's expertise beyond sound, covering the full spectrum of human interaction with artificial environments, from concert halls to cars, and across all the senses.
And of course, he searched for his old colleague Licklider and hired him as vice president for psychoacoustics on generous terms. However, Beranek underestimated Lick's wild enthusiasm for interactive computing. Instead of a psychoacoustics expert, he got not quite a computer expert but a computer evangelist eager to open others' eyes. Within a year, he convinced Beranek to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a small, underpowered LGP-30 computer made by the defense contractor Librascope. Lacking engineering experience, he brought in another SAGE veteran, Edward Fredkin, to help set this machine up. Despite the fact that the computer mainly distracted Lick fromhis main work while he tried to learn programming, after a year and a half, he convinced the partners to spend even more money ($150,000, which in today's money is roughly $1.25 million) to purchase a more powerful computer: the latest PDP-1 from DEC. Lick convinced BBN that digital computers held the future and that somehow, someday, their investments in experience in this area would pay off.
Soon after, Lick found himself almost by accident in a position perfectly suited for spreading interactive culture throughout the country, becoming the head of a new government computing agency.
ARPA
During the Cold War, every action had its counteraction. Just as the first Soviet atomic bomb led to the creation of SAGE, so did , launched by the USSR in October 1957, generate a flurry of reactions within the U.S. government. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that while the USSR had lagged behind the U.S. by four years regarding nuclear bomb development, it made a significant leap forward in rocketry, surpassing the Americans in the race to orbit (by about four months).
One response to the emergence of Sputnik 1 in 1958 was the establishment of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the U.S. Department of Defense. Unlike the modest sums allocated for civil science, ARPA was granted a budget of $520 million, three times the funding of the National Science Foundation, which itself was tripled in response to the launch of Sputnik 1.
Despite the fact that the Agency could work on a wide range of advanced projects deemed feasible by the Secretary of Defense, it was initially intended to focus all attention on missile development and space – such was the determined response to Sputnik-1. ARPA reported directly to the Secretary of Defense, allowing it to rise above the counterproductive and weakening rivalries within the industry by developing a coherent plan for the growth of the American space program. However, soon all its projects in this field were taken over by rivals: the Air Force was unwilling to cede control over military missile development, and the national Aeronautics and Space Act, signed in July 1958, created a new civilian agency responsible for all space-related issues that did not involve weaponry. Nevertheless, after its establishment, ARPA found reasons to survive, as it received major research projects in ballistic missile defense and nuclear test detection. It also became a working ground for minor projects that various military agencies desired to explore. So instead of being the leader, the agency became the tail.
The last project selected was the “,” a spacecraft with a nuclear pulse propulsion system ("nuclear pulse rocket"). ARPA ceased funding it in 1959 as it could only envision it as a purely civilian project, falling under NASA's jurisdiction. NASA, in turn, did not want to tarnish its pristine reputation by getting involved with nuclear weapons. The Air Force reluctantly contributed some funds to keep the project alive, but it ultimately died following the 1963 treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere or space. And while the idea was technically very interesting, it is hard to imagine any government approving the launch of a rocket filled with thousands of nuclear bombs.
The first intrusion of ARPA into the field of computers occurred simply out of necessity to occupy management. In 1961, the Air Force had two idle assets that needed engagement. As the deployment of the first SAGE detection centers approached, the Air Force enlisted the RAND Corporation from Santa Monica, California, to train personnel and equip more than twenty computerized air defense centers with management programs. For this task, RAND created an entirely new entity, the System Development Corporation (SDC). The experience gained by SDC in software proved valuable to the Air Force; however, the SAGE project was finishing up and they had nothing to occupy themselves with. The second idle asset was the extremely expensive surplus computer AN/FSQ-32, which had been requisitioned from IBM for the SAGE project but was later deemed unnecessary. The Department of Defense decided to resolve both issues by giving ARPA a new research task related to command centers and promised a grant of $6 million for SDC to study the challenges of command centers using the Q-32.
Shortly thereafter, ARPA decided to oversee this research program as part of a new division focused on information processing research. Around the same time, the management received a new assignment—to create a program in the field of behavioral science. The exact reasons remain unclear, but the management decided to hire Licklider as the director of both programs. This may have been the idea of Gene Fubini, the director of research at the Department of Defense, who knew Lick from his work on SAGE.
Like Beranek before him, Jack Ruina, who was then leading ARPA, had no idea what he was in for when he invited Lick to an interview. He thought he was getting a behavioral expert with some knowledge of computing. Instead, he encountered the full force of ideas about the symbiosis between humans and computers. Lick asserted that a computerized command center would need interactive computers, and therefore the main driver of ARPA's research program should be a breakthrough in cutting-edge interactive computing machines. For Lick, this meant time-sharing.
Time-sharing
Time-sharing systems emerged based on the same fundamental principle as Clark's TX series: computers should be user-friendly. However, unlike Clark, advocates of time-sharing believed that one person could not efficiently utilize an entire computer. A researcher might spend several minutes studying the output of a program before making a small change and restarting it. During this interval, the computer would have nothing to do, and its tremendous power would be wasted, which would be costly. Even the intervals between keystrokes of hundreds of milliseconds seemed like vast chasms of lost computer time during which thousands of calculations could be performed.
This computational power need not go to waste if it can be distributed among many users. By dividing the attention of the computer so that it serves each user in turn, the computer designer could achieve two aims with one effort – provide the illusion of an interactive computer fully under the user's control while not wasting a large portion of the computational capacity of expensive hardware.
This concept was already embedded in SAGE, which could serve dozens of different operators simultaneously, each tracking their own sector of airspace. Upon meeting Clark, Lick immediately saw the potential of combining user time-sharing in SAGE with the interactive freedom of TX-0 and TX-2 to create a new, powerful blend, which laid the foundation for his advocacy of the symbiosis between humans and computers, presented to the defense department in his 1957 paper "A Truly Intelligent System, or Onward to Hybrid Thinking Systems Machine/Human" [sage engl. – wise man / translator's note]. In this paper, he described a computing system for scientists, very similar in structure to SAGE, with input via a light gun, and "simultaneous use (with rapid time-sharing) of the machine's capabilities for computation and information storage by many people."
However, Lick did not have the engineering skills to develop or create such a system. He learned the basics of programming at BBN, but that was the extent of his capabilities. The first person to practically implement the theory of time-sharing was John McCarthy, a mathematician from MIT. McCarthy needed constant access to a computer to create tools and models for manipulating mathematical logic—what he believed were the first steps toward artificial intelligence. In 1959, he crafted a prototype consisting of an interactive module attached to the MIT's IBM 704 computer with batch processing. Ironically, the first 'time-sharing device' had only one interactive console—a Flexowriter teletype.
By the early 1960s, the MIT engineering department recognized the need for active investments in interactive computing. Every student and faculty member interested in programming was using the computers. Batch processing made extremely efficient use of computer time, but it wasted a lot of researchers' time—the average task processing time on the 704 exceeded one day.
To explore long-term plans for meeting the growing demand for computing resources, MIT organized a university committee dominated by advocates of time-sharing. Clark argued that the transition to interactivity did not mean time-sharing. He stated that from a practical standpoint, time-sharing meant giving up interactive video displays and real-time interaction—which were critically important aspects of the project he was working on at the MIT biophysics lab. However, at a more fundamental level, it appeared that Clark had a deep philosophical aversion to the idea of sharing his workspace. Until 1990, he refused to connect his computer to the internet, declaring that networks were a 'mistake' and that they 'do not work.'
He, along with his students, formed a "sub-subculture," a tiny offshoot within the already eccentric academic culture of interactive computing machines. However, their arguments in favor of small workstations, which did not require sharing with anyone, did not convince their colleagues. Considering the cost of even the smallest standalone computer at that time, this approach seemed economically unjustified to other engineers. Moreover, most at that time believed that computers—intellectual power plants of the emerging information age—would benefit from economies of scale, just as power plants did. In the spring of 1961, the final report from the committee authorized the creation of large time-sharing systems as part of MIT's development.
By that time, Fernando Corbató, known to his colleagues as "Corby," was already working to scale up McCarthy's experiment. By training, he was a physicist, and he learned about computers while working on Whirlwind in 1951, still a graduate student at MIT (the only one of all participants in this story to survive—he was 92 in January 2019). After earning his doctorate, he became an administrator at the newly created MIT computing center, established using the IBM 704. Corbató and his team (initially consisting of Marge Mervin and Bob Daily, two of the center's top programmers) named their time-sharing system CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System), as it could operate concurrently with the regular workload of the 704, automatically seizing computer cycles for users as needed. Without such compatibility, this project would not have worked, as Corby lacked funding to purchase a new computer to build a time-sharing system from scratch, and he could not halt existing batch processing operations.
By the end of 1961, CTSS could support four terminals. By 1963, MIT had two instances of CTSS running on IBM 7094 transistor machines, each costing $3.5 million, approximately ten times more than the previous 704 machines in terms of memory capacity and processor power. The control software cycled through active users, serving each for a fraction of a second before moving on to the next. Users could save programs and data for later use in their own password-protected disk memory spaces.
Corbato in his signature bow tie in the computer room with IBM 7094.
Corby explains the time-sharing scheme, including a two-level queue, in a broadcast from 1963.
Each computer could serve about 20 terminals. This was enough not only to support a couple of small terminal rooms but also to extend access to the computer throughout Cambridge. Corby and other key engineers had their own terminals in the office, and at some point, MIT began providing home terminals for technical staff so they could work with the system after hours without needing to go to work. All early terminals consisted of a modified typewriter that could read data and send it over the phone line, and continuous-feed perforated paper. Modems connected terminals via phones to a private switch on MIT's premises, through which they could connect to the CTSS computer. Thus, the computer extended its sensory organs via telephone and signals, turning from digital to analog and back. This was the first stage of integrating computers with the telecommunications network. The integration was facilitated by AT&T's ambiguous regulatory status. The core of the network was still regulated, and the company was required to provide dedicated lines at fixed rates, but several FCC rulings blurred the company's control over the periphery, and it could do little to object to connecting various devices to its lines. Therefore, MIT did not need permission for the terminals.
A typical computer terminal from the mid-1960s: IBM 2741.
The ultimate goal of Licklider, McCarthy, and Corbato was to increase the accessibility of computational power for individual researchers. They opted for resource sharing and time-sharing for economic reasons: no one could envision a scenario where each researcher at MIT would have their own computer. However, this choice led to unintended side effects that could not be realized within Clark's paradigm of 'one person, one computer.' A shared file system and cross-references to user accounts allowed them to collaborate, share, and complement each other's work. In 1965, Noel Morris and Tom Van Vleck accelerated collaboration and communication by creating the MAIL program, which enabled users to exchange messages. When a user sent a message, the program appended it to a special mailbox file in the recipient's file area. If that file was not empty, the LOGIN program would display the message 'YOU HAVE MAIL.' The contents of the machine turned into an expression of the actions of a community of users, and this social aspect of time-sharing at MIT became valued as highly as the original idea of interactive computer usage.
Scattered seeds
Having accepted ARPA's offer and leaving BBN to head the new ARPA division, the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) in 1962, Lick quickly engaged in what he had promised: concentrating the company's research efforts in computing on the distribution and enhancement of time-sharing hardware and software. He departed from the usual practice of handling research proposals that were supposed to come to his desk and instead went 'into the field,' encouraging engineers to create research proposals that he would like to approve.
His first step was to reconfigure the existing research project of the SDC command centers in Santa Monica. A team from Nick's office at SDC came to reduce the efforts in directing this research and focus on transforming the surplus SAGE computer into a time-sharing system. Nick believed that the foundation needed to be laid first in terms of human-machine interaction with time-sharing, and only then would the command centers emerge. The fact that this prioritization coincided with his philosophical interests was merely a happy coincidence. Jules Schwartz, a veteran of the SAGE project, was developing the new time-sharing system. Like its contemporary CTSS, it became a virtual meeting place, and among its features was the DIAL function for sending personal text messages from one user to another – as illustrated in the following exchange between John Jones and a user with ID 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 LAUNCH THE PROG
FROM 9 WE CAN GIVE YOU THAT IN 5 MINUTES
FROM 9 GO AHEAD AND START
Then, to secure funding for future time-sharing development projects at MIT, Licklider found Robert Fano to lead his flagship project: Project MAC, which endured until the 1970s (there were many interpretations of MAC – "Mathematics And Computation," "Multiple-Access Computer," "Machine-Aided Cognition"). Although the developers hoped that the new system could support at least 200 simultaneous users, they did not account for the continually growing complexity of user software, which easily consumed all enhancements in hardware speed and efficiency. After its launch at MIT in 1969, the system could support about 60 users using its two central processors, which was roughly equal to the number of users per processor in CTSS. However, the total number of users far exceeded the maximum possible load – by June 1970, there were already 408 registered users.
The system software of the project called Multics boasted some serious improvements, some of which are still considered cutting-edge in today's operating systems: a hierarchical file system with a tree structure of folders that can contain other folders; separation of command executions from the user and the system at the hardware level; dynamic linking of programs with the loading of software modules during execution on demand; 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 (the name reflects its predecessor) to transfer some of these concepts to simpler and less expansive computer systems [The name "UNIX" (originally "Unics") was formed from "Multics." The letter U in UNIX stood for "Uniplexed" as opposed to the term "Multiplexed" which was the basis for the name of the Multics system, highlighting the creators' attempt to move away from the complexities of Multics to develop a simpler and more practical approach.]
The last seed Lik dropped in Berkeley, at the University of California. The Genie12 project, started in 1963, gave rise to the Berkeley Timesharing System – a commercially oriented, smaller-scale copy of Project MAC. Although it was nominally managed by several university professors, the real work was led by student Mel Partridge, with help from other students, notably Chuck Tucker, Peter Deutsch, and Butler Lampson. Some of them had already contracted the interactivity virus in Cambridge before arriving in Berkeley. Deutsch, the son of a physics professor from MIT and a prototyping enthusiast, implemented the Lisp programming language on a Digital PDP-1 as a teenager, even before he became a student in Berkeley. Lampson programmed on the PDP-1 at the Cambridge electron accelerator while he was a Harvard student. Partridge and his team created the time-sharing system on the SDS 930, developed by Scientific Data Systems, a new computer company founded in Santa Monica in 1961 (a whole separate article could be written about the technical achievements occurring in Santa Monica at the time. RAND Corporation, SDC, and SDS, whose headquarters were there, made significant contributions to cutting-edge computer technology in the 1960s).
SDS integrated software from Berkeley into its new project, SDS 940. It became one of the most popular time-sharing computer systems by the late 1960s. Tymshare and Comshare, companies that commercialized time-sharing by selling remote computing services, purchased dozens of SDS 940 units. Partridge and his team also decided to try their hand in the commercial market and founded Berkeley Computer Corporation (BCC) in 1968, but during the recession of 1969-1970, it filed for bankruptcy. Most of Partridge's team ended up at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where Tucker, Deutsch, and Lampson contributed to landmark projects, including the personal workstation Alto, local area networks, and the laser printer.
Mel Partridge (center) next to the Berkeley Timesharing System
Of course, not every time-sharing project from the 1960s was created thanks to Licklider. News of what was happening at MIT and the Lincoln Labs spread through technical literature, conferences, academic acquaintances, and staff transitions from one job to another. Through these channels, other seeds borne by the wind took root. At the University of Illinois, Don Bitzer sold his PLATO system to the Department of Defense, which aimed to reduce the cost of technical training for military personnel. Clifford Shaw developed the JOHNNIAC Open Shop System (JOSS), funded by the Air Force, designed to enhance RAND employees' capabilities for rapid numerical analysis. The Dartmouth time-sharing system was directly linked to events at MIT, but was otherwise a completely unique project, funded solely by private citizens through the National Science Foundation under the assumption that computer experience would become an essential part of the education of the next generation of leaders in the U.S.
By the mid-1960s, time-sharing had not yet fully captured the ecosystem of computing machines. Traditional batch processing enterprises dominated, both in sales and popularity, especially outside university campuses. However, it did find 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 IBM's research center north of New York City. Shocked by the loss of the Project MAC contract to a competing computer manufacturer, General Electric, after many years of good relations with MIT, Lick was supposed to share with IBM his firsthand experience of the trend that seemed to be passing the company by. For Lick, the new job offered an opportunity to turn the last bastion of traditional batch data processing into a new belief in interactivity (but it didn’t work out – Lick was pushed to the background, and his wife suffered from being isolated in the wilderness of Yorktown Heights. He transferred to IBM's Cambridge office, and then in 1967 returned to MIT to lead Project MAC).
Ivan Sutherland, a young computer graphics expert, succeeded Licklider as head of IPTO, followed by Robert Taylor in 1966. Licklider's 1960 work 'Man-Computer Symbiosis' turned Taylor into an advocate for interactive computers, and on Licklider's recommendation, he joined ARPA after working briefly on a research program at NASA. His personality and experience made him more like Licklider than Sutherland. With a background in psychology and lacking technical knowledge in computing, he compensated for this absence with enthusiasm and confident leadership.
One day, while in his office, the newly appointed head of IPTO had an idea. He was sitting at a desk with three different terminals that connected him to three time-sharing systems funded by ARPA, located in Cambridge, Berkeley, and Santa Monica. However, these systems were not connected to each other — to transfer information from one system to another, he had to do it himself, physically, using his body and mind.
The seeds planted by Licklider bore fruit. He created a social community of IPTO staff that spread to many other computing centers, each developing a small community of computing experts gathered around a time-sharing computer. Taylor thought it was time to link these centers together. Their separate social and technical structures, when connected, could form a kind of superorganism, with its root system spreading across the continent, replicating the social advantages of time-sharing on a higher level. And from this idea began the technical and political contests that led to the creation of ARPANET.
Further reading
- 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: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (2001)
Source: habr.com
