Textbook of AI

1915–1990, Psychologist, computer-science administrator

Also known as: Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, Lick

J. C. R. Licklider was an American psychologist and computer scientist whose 1960 paper Man-Computer Symbiosis and 1968 The Computer as a Communication Device (with Robert Taylor) articulated the vision of computers as collaborative partners of human users, a vision that became the conceptual foundation of the personal computer and of the Internet. As the first director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) from 1962, "Lick" funded the early development of time-sharing, computer graphics, the ARPANET, and AI research at MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, SRI and elsewhere.

The decisions Licklider made and the relationships he built shaped American computer science for thirty years. The community he funded called itself the "Intergalactic Computer Network", a semi-joking name in his memos that became the mailing list and, eventually, the conceptual core of the Internet.