- Hardcover: 528 pages
- Publisher: Viking USA (Aug 30 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0670899763
- ISBN-13: 978-0670899760
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 16 x 4.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 794 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #520,692 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon.co.uk
Science writer M Mitchell Waldrop carefully balances the prevailing "hero culture" with a historian's mania for completeness in The Dream Machine: JCR Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal. While it's true that no one person's vision encompassed all of what we now consider personal computing, we can't help but focus on individual effort as we try to understand how we got here.
"Lick," as his students and colleagues called him, was deeply involved in guiding the evolution of personal and networked computing from the 1950s through the 1980s after leaving a career in cognitive psychology. Waldrop captures his spirit vividly--contrary to our stereotypical view of computer scientists, Licklider was profoundly interested in his fellow humans, and this interest helped him lead the design of technology adapted to human needs.
Waldrop interviewed dozens of contemporaries and examined reams of notes and primary sources to compose this massive biography of influence that stretches from MIT to the Pentagon to Xerox PARC and far beyond. If it sometimes seems that Licklider was a little too well-beloved, especially in comparison to some of the more colourful figures in computing's recent history, it is worth remembering that his patience and humility were the very qualities that helped deliver the home computing revolution we take for granted today. If we had to choose just one 20th-century computer pioneer that we couldn't do without, it would have to be the man behind The Dream Machine. --Rob Lightner
From Publishers Weekly
Licklider was a brilliant scientist whose essential contributions to cognitive psychology and cybernetics included critical early developments in the field of man-machine interaction. However, his original work is often overshadowed by his accomplishments as a teacher, administrator and project leader and this ably written and well-researched biography isn't likely to propel him into the limelight. Waldrop (Man-Made Minds) devotes about 20% of the book to Licklider himself; the rest covers his teachers, colleagues and students at MIT and the Pentagon including computing pioneers Douglas Engelbart, Wes Clark and Larry Roberts and Licklider's indirect influence on the development of personal computers and the Internet (via "the world's first large-scale experiment in personal computing" at MIT). To his credit, Waldrop avoids common stereotypes of computer nerds or saints, delivering a vivid account of Licklider and his contemporaries. But he was not able to interview Licklider (who died in 1990), nor does he include material from personal papers or memoirs. Instead, Waldrop bases most of the book on secondary accounts, including biographies and histories of technology. The result is an informative and engaging history of computers from the 1930s to the 1970s, with an emphasis on Licklider and his period of greatest influence, 1957 to 1968. (Aug. 27)Forecast: A six-city author tour will raise some interest, but there isn't much demand for another history of computing and the Internet, especially when Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon's Where Wizards Stay Up Late and Martin Campbell-Kelly's Computer cover the same material.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Comprehensive Historical Overview,
By
This review is from: Dream Machine (Paperback)
A graduate course in a book! A tour through historical theories, accounts, and events that made up the development of the modern computer and the Net. Far more extensive than just the story of Kicklider, a historical overview of many of the minds at that time and the events that converged to form the new informaton era.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A computer chronology that reads like a novel,
By
This review is from: Dream Machine (Paperback)
If The Dream Machine were a novel, you might conclude the author used every writer's technique to make it a thriller. Even though you know the outcome, you wonder how the many "miracles" and lucky breaks it took for the dream to become reality.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Who really created Windows?,
By
This review is from: Dream Machine (Hardcover)
Many books and documentaries have been produced chronicling the emergence of the mouse, windows and the internet. Most focus on familiar personalities: Gates, Wozniak, Jobs, and that crowd. But, that's too simplistic; they're merely the contemporary pioneers of the modern computer age. All of these invetions were propelled by visionaries of an earlier age, and J.C.R. Lickleider was one them. If you're interested in the history of emergent technology, you'll be fascinated by this alternate tale of the computer revolution in which one man became the focal point of technological change. His name is not a familiar one to most, yet without his ability to get university (and later government) financing for what seemed like zany ideas at the time, we might not have seen the development of ARPAnet, the progenitor of the modern internet. Though Lickleider himself probably never had a complete vision of what was to come from his efforts, there can be little doubt that his role was pivotal.Author Waldrop takes you through Lickleider's life in academia where he struggled to push his vision of "computing for everyone" in which computers really would be used by the common person, not just by the military or major corporations -- a vision which was understandably rejected by most of his peers when computers were still the size of living rooms and cost as much as the GDP of small nations. Readers who are familiar with James Burke's "Connections" series will see a similar pattern to this story in which one person was at the right place at the right time to gather disperate technological threads together. Lickleider was not responsible for tying the final knot of these threads together, but without his influence, it might have taken a lot longer.
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