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Highly recommend reading The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop for a really great peak into Licklider and the revolution he brought about

• criddell 4y ago
  The version published by Stripe Press is beautiful, but the font is very small. I bought the Stripe Press version and 30 minutes into it I went looking for a digital version to read on my Kindle where I could choose my own font. I absolutely loved the book.
  • boxfire 4y ago
    Agree on the density, also initially I had that cool holographic cover facing out the open side of my bookshelf to the living room until one night a passing headlight beamed across it in the dark and I realized how absolutely incredibly creepy it was to have Lick as sudden posthumous voyeur... On the idea and content, it reveals to me there was a great shadow world of ideas in those early days I think are still being "rediscovered" in the current time. We did an awful job of following through on visionaries like him, hell even Grace Hopper's simple 1955 paper on compiler thru compiler compilers didnt make a comeback until the shadows of the 70's, then 90's, and the past decade. We imagined the world in the 50s. We invented it in the 60s. And then we entered a profit-driven dark age that is barely letting those results trickle into everyday reality. The future of computing is so far from what we conceptualize today we still don't even have the vocabulary for it. Conceptually this essay lays it out. Try synthesizing a toy program in Idris2 with a lsp server and querying the compiler about what you are writing as you explore. It will open your eyes that we have just hit this reality. Don't be fooled by copilot, its the cheap plastic copy of real intelligence working with computers alternating their best strengths.