The Dream Machine (2001)

by M. Mitchell Waldrop

M. Mitchell Waldrop: The Dream Machine, J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal, 502 pages, Viking, Penguin Group, 2001, ISBN 0-670-89976-3.

This book covers the turn in computing from the first digital computers in the 1940s and the batch-processing mainframes in the early 1960s to personal computers and the Internet in the late 1990s. The book is structured along Lickliders life, from its initial dream of a man-computer symbiosis until its stepwise realisation.

Licklider

MIT, Norbert Wiener

Vannebar Bush - analogue computer "Differential Analyzer"

ABC Atanasoff-Berry Computer 1939

Howard H. Aiken (considered himself Babbage's spiritual heir), IBM, 1944, programmable, base-10 arithm., later called Mark I, "First case of an actual bug being found."

Konrad Zuse, "the earliest, most fully thought out, and most farsighted of the pioneering projects of the 1930s", isolated, wartime Germany

Alan Turing, decidability problem

Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator, ENIAC, John von Neumann. The stored-program concept (separation from hardware and software).

Digital Equipment Corporation, PDP-1

McCarthy, AI, Lisp, time-sharing

1957, Sputnik shock. Eisenhower, ARPA to consolidate all the Pentagon's space research

1962, Licklider joint ARPA, until 1964, engages Ivan Sutherland as successor

1963, Robert Fano, MIT, Project MAC — "Machine Aided Cognition" (ultimate goal), "Multiple Access Computer" (tool created). CTSS (1st time-sharing system), Multics (2nd time-sharing system, first being designed from ground up as such)

CTSS. IBM 7090, 7094. Terminals as teletype, via telephone from home, too. Directories and files, command language, user driven commands, user passwords.

Multics. Multiprocessor, programming started 1965.

IBM System/360 (for 360 degrees round) line of computers, small up to huge, all software-compatible. Batch processing. 1 processor. Introduced 8 bits "byte"

Arpanet. First 4 nodes. Request For Comments RFC (inofficial)

1968 Licklider back to MIT, director of Project MAC. End of Project MAC.

1969 Bell Labs, after dropping Multics Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson create Unix as time-sharing system for their own use and invent C. Free distributed because AT&T as a telephone company was not allowed to sell it.

1970 Palo Alto Research Center, Xerox PARC, Bob Taylor

Alan Key, Dynabook

Bob Metcalfe, Ether-net (following Aloha Network)

Robert E. Kahn, Internetworking (later Internet)

1973-1974 Vint Cerf, Robert Kahn, TCP Transmission Control Protocoll, IP Internet Protocol. RFC 675

End 1975 3 independent implementations working

Alto (personal computer), Laser Printer

1981 Apple Lisa, Mac

CP/M, DOS, Windows, Microsoft

Late 1980s The Internet