J. C. R. Licklider - The Man Behind Our Lifestyle

If you work with a computer, it seems to me you owe a tremendous debt to Lick, who did more than any other single person to shape people's perspectives on how computers could be used. He ultimately stimulated researchers into developing networking, graphical displays, and operating systems to support interactive computing, and he fostered their ideas in a unique way to turn his own vision into the reality that is personal computing today.

I thought I'd celebrate finishing "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell M. Waldrop- book of the year for me - by capturing this seminal pair of articles Licklider wrote in 1960 and 1968 ("Man-Computer Symbiosis" and "The Computer as a Communication Device"). Waldrop's book is intriguing and very well researched - Licklider's articles are just as prescient as when he wrote them 40 years ago. You should read them!

This illustration is from "The Computer as a Communications Device".