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Man-Computer Symbiosis Alive

Man-Computer Symbiosis
KindPaper
Published1960
StatusAlive
AuthorsJ.C.R. Licklider
FieldHCI
Sourcegroups.csail.mit.edu ↗

Lick's vision of partnership rather than automation — the intellectual charter for interactive computing, written years before the hardware could honor it.

Created by J. C. R. Licklider

Published in IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, the paper argued computers should be 'symbiotic partners' — doing formulation, storage, and retrieval while humans set goals and judge outcomes. Licklider predicted it would take ten to fifteen years to arrive; interactive computing was still batch-processing's stepchild in 1960.

Licklider then went to ARPA and funded the field into existence — timesharing, Engelbart's lab, and the ARPANET all trace to the program he started in 1962. 'Man-Computer Symbiosis' is the rare vision paper whose author got to execute it.

Sources

  1. groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html
  2. ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4503917
  3. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._C._R._Licklider