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The dream machine waldrop6/1/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() And the impresario, the sugar-daddy funder, the counselor, protector, and cheerleader of this rebel band was Licklider, by then at the Department of Defense. The dreamers were at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, UCBerkeley, RAND, BBN, SRI, and Xerox PARC. So the job of developing the Dream Machine of this book's title fell to the mavericks, the outsiders, the rebels. ![]() In the '70s, the CEO of DEC was famously quoted as asking, "Why would anyone want a computer on his desktop?" It was the start of the information age, and the mainstream just didn't get it. Operators entered arcane codes and the machines spit out reams of useful data-filled pages. Expressed most vividly in his 1960 paper "Man-Computer Symbiosis," Lick's visions seem boringly familiar today: personal computers, graphical interfaces, voice interaction, the Internet (he called it the Intergalactic Computer Network), online reference sources, and what we now call intelligent agents.īut the computer world - an increasingly vital part of the economy - was following a steady and productive route. Yet Lick insisted that computers had to connect to people on people's terms, not the machines'. ![]()
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