Joseph C. R. Licklider :: essays research papers

     Joseph C. R. convulselider died when he was 75, on June 26, 1990. His expiration was caused by a heart attack that followed because of complications from asthma. Licklider was born in St. Louis, second and educated at Washington University and the University of Rochester. There he received his trinity bachelors degrees in math, physics, and psychology. Licklider was well liked and had a precise good reputation for being very humble, often letting others take credit for his ideas. Licklider obscureness and good manners were probably part of his mid-western upbringing. Licklider came to Massachusetts Institute of applied science in 1950. Previously, he had locomoteed at Harvard Universitys Psychoacoustics Laboratory, where he discovered that "clipped talk" was 70-90 percent intelligible. Professor Lickliders background was in the psychology of communications, and he play a major role in stimulating linguistics question at MIT while contributi ng to the study of biological characteristics of communication. Licklider lectured on the neurophysiology of imaging and hearing, the perception of speech, and the presentation and absorption of information. J.C.R. Lickliders contribution to the development of the Internet consists of ideas not inventions. He foresaw the need for networked computers with easy user interfaces. His ideas foretold of graphical cypher, point-and -click interfaces, digital libraries, e-commerce, online banking, and software program that would exist on a network and migrate to wherever it was needed. He has been called, "Computings Johnny Appleseed," a well-deserved nickname for a man who planted the seeds of cypher in the digital age. Licklider planted his symbolic seeds at two very important places. Most importantly, he worked for several years at ARPA, which is Pentagons modernistic Research Projects Agency, where he set the stage for the creation of the ARPANET. Licklider worked at style Beranek and Newman, the company that supplied the first computers connected on the ARPANET. He did his doctoral work in psychoacoustics. In 1942, he went to work at Harvards Psychoacoustics Laboratory where he did work for the Air Force to find solutions for the communication problems faced by crewman in noisy bomber aircraft. Joseph Licklider worked on a unwarmed War project called SAGE designed to create computer-based air defense mechanism systems against Soviet Union bombers. Lick became increasingly interested in computing thereafter. Coming to the world of computing from a psychology background gave Lick a unique perspective. Computing at the time consisted mainly of batch-processing operations. hulking problems would be outlined in advance and operations coded onto paper lick cards that were then fed into computers in large batches.