The Dream Machine

Everyone has heard about the amazing ideas and systems from Xerox PARC, but few realize that this lab was was the culmination of JCR Licklider's vision of personal, interactive computing, not its birthplace. Licklider provided the vision and impetus to form the ARPA-funded core of computer science research, which lead to Douglas Englebart's windows and mice, Xerox PARC's innovations, and the Internet. The next time that you hear someone saying that government can't do anything well, give them a copy of this book.This book is a fascinating, well-written exposition of Licklider's life and work, and even more interestingly, the birth of computer science in the United States. I've never before seen this story as a continuous whole, as opposed to a collection of independent breakthroughs. It is a fascinating narrative, and this is a great book.

For anyone interested in why computers and the net are the way they are today, this entertaining and well-written account is essential. Using Licklider as the fulcrum, it covers the origins of computer science, interactive computing, and the internetworked PC world we live with today in a very personal way. It provides an insight into how these ideas evolved and how the personalities behind them animated that evolution. It is admittedly a very MIT/ARPA centric history, but given that's where many of these ideas had their genesis, it does a good job of covering a large amount of the territory of modern computing history. The one question the book leaves unanswered is why the field has not evolved further in the last twenty years. After all, as Waldrop demonstrates, the seeds of what we take for granted today were demonstrably in place 20-25 years ago.

I read every page as quickly as my reading time permitted. It is excellent and covers the history of the Internet and associated matters, written around Licklider's thoughts and philsophy from start to today. But it is far more than a story about Licklider. It covers sketchs of the contributions of John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, J. Presper Eckert, John Mauchly, Claude Shannon and a dozen others. Then it takes up Licklider's fruitful stay at Bolt Beranek & Newman, Inc., followed by his service for ARPA and how he spread time sharing across the country by government financing. His long story about Project MAC at MIT which grew from ARPA contracts is highly informative. ARPA's moneys helped bring to fame some of the best known names in computer technology today. An ARPA contract led to the building of the ARPANET by BBN (after Lick returned to MIT), which when the ARPANET adopted the TCP/IP protocol, signaled the birth of the Internet. I was intrigued by the history of computer developments at Xerox's PARC Laboratory and how a "blind" management can kill a group's great innovations. The book ends with Licklider becoming an elder brother to Lick's Kids at MIT, his 70th birthday party, and his last days. This book is a must if you are interested in the growth of networking and computer usage as told around the life of a great man.

I was a ms reviewer of this complete, but very readable book based on JCR Licklider's vision of interactive and networked computing. It covers almost 50 years of computing.Why most of us need a copy:It presents an accurate and quite complete history of the research and ideas that include timesharing, personal computing, graphics, Internet, etc.I use it to check my memory on various facts.The book is well written = easy and pleasant reading.

The Dream Machine deserves many more than five stars. Mr. Waldrop provides a valuable synthesis of several important perspectives:(1) The development of personal, interconnected computing from its fundamental roots in academic and corporate scientific thinking, conceptualization, and experimentation;(2) How the vision of one man, Professor J. C. R. Licklider, played an important role in nurturing the development of this form of computing;(3) How creating a computing community that frequently shared ideas in-person and on-line accelerated the development of the technology and the society it served; and(4) How the contributions of the major and minors players fit together to bring us where we are today. Whenever I read a book about the history or current state of computing in the future, The Dream Machine will be valuable for helping me put the observations into context. This is true despite the fact that I have been doing consulting in this industry for almost 30 years, and had early access to many of its important innovations. In fact, if you only read one book about computers in the next two years, The Dream Machine should be that book.As valuable as I found that framing of the development, I was even more impressed with seeing how to foster fundamental human development through this example. Professor Licklider was trained initially in psychology. From that unusual perspective on computers, he quickly perceived what humans can do better than computers (make judgments, fine distinctions, and decide what order to do things in) and what computers can do better than humans (make difficult calculations, remember lots of things at the same time, and rearrange mountains of information into new forms of order). He also foresaw that the full exploitation of these combinations would have to come from playing with a responsive computer that did your bidding during real time. Although he knew that the costs of such would be prohibitive for many years, he helped encourage first time sharing and later software protocols that would bring the experience to as many people as soon as possible. Although he was not alone in his perception of all this, he was unique in his dedication and influence in bringing it all together through a long career as an academic and business researcher, visionary leader, professor, mentor, and twice head of ARPA computing activities in the Pentagon. His life should be an object lesson to all about how much difference one can make through bringing the right people and resources together to work on the right questions. If you are like me, you will find reading about Professor Licklider to be one of the most moving experiences you will ever have from reading a combination of history and biography. Some will complain because the book relies primarily on secondary sources. I found that foundation in books and stories I know well to be its strength. There is an enormous amount written about the history of computers and k