A. V. Williams Building Room 2460
Mitch Waldrop, PhD, Author

Sometime in the mid-1970s, according to the standard accounts, a pack of techno-savvy kids with names like Gates, Jobs, and Wozniak began to play around in their garages and dorm rooms with the new technology of microprocessors - thereby pioneering the personal computer revolution almost by accident. And in fairness, the standard accounts do contain a kernel of truth: these young entrepreneurs did see the mass-market potential of microchips sooner than almost anyone.

However, they were "not" the beginning of the story. What really put the fire in the PC revolution (and in the Internet revolution that would follow) wasn't the hardware or the software per se, but the message those products embodied-the realization that computers didn't have to be huge, ominous machines sitting off in a back room somewhere, processing punch cards for some large institution. Instead, computers could be humane, intimate machines, responding to us and helping us as individuals. Computers could enhance human creativity, democratize access to information, foster wider communities, and build a new global commons for communication and commerce. Computers, in short, could be instruments of individual empowerment. And the fact is that the foundations for that vision of computing had been laid more than three decades earlier-by the very same government and the very same establishment that the Seventies generation so distrusted. Indeed, that vision animated what was arguably the most fabulously successful program of government-funded research ever.

In this talk, M. Mitchell Waldrop, author of a newly released book, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal and Complexity: the Emerging Science At the Edge of Order and Chaos (the best-selling book profiling the dramatic intellectual origin of the Santa Fe Institute) will trace the history of this larger revolution-and tell the story of one of computing's great unsung heroes: J. C. R. Licklider.

Further Information: Adelaide Findlay, (301-405-2662, adelaide@cs.umd.edu)

Suggested Reading:

M. Mitchell Waldrop. The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal. New York: Viking, 2001.

M. Mitchell Waldrop. "Computing's Johnny Appleseed." Technology Review (Jan/Feb 2000). http://www.technologyreview.com/magazine/jan00/waldrop.asp

J. C. R. Licklider, "Man-Computer Symbiosis." IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics (1960): 4-11. http://www.memex.org/licklider.pdf

J. C. R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor. "The Computer As a Communication Device." Science & Technology 76 (1968): 21-31. http://www.memex.org/licklider.pdf

Fall 2001