CHAPTER 6
 

Cybernetics, Time-sharing, Human-Computer Symbiosis
and On-line Communities
Creating a Supercommunity of On-Line Communities
By Ronda Hauben
rh120@columbia.edu

Part I - Foundations of the Cybernetic Revolution

In 1961, MIT was to celebrate its centennial anniversary.
Martin Greenberger, who had joined the MIT faculty in 1958,
describes how a call went out for interesting ways to celebrate.
"I proposed a series of lectures," he recalled, "on the computer
and the future. We threw open the hatches and got together
the best people we could assemble -- whatever their fields. We
asked these thinkers to project ahead and help us understand what
was in store."(1)

Charles Percy Snow, a British writer was invited to be the keynote
speaker. His talk "Scientists and Decision Making," discussed the need
for democratic and broad based participation in the decisions of society.
"We happen to be living at a time of a major scientific revolution," he
observed, "probably more important in its consequences, than the first
Industrial Revolution, a revolution which we shall see in full force in
the very near future."(2)

He and the other speakers expressed their concern that the
challenges represented by the computer be understood and treated
seriously. They felt that there would need to be government decisions
regarding the development and application of the computer. They cautioned
that these decisions be entrusted to people who understood the problems
they were dealing with. Also, they were concerned that the smaller the
number of people involved in important social decisions, the more likely
it would be that serious errors of judgment would be made. They urged
that it was necessary to open up the decision making process to as broad a
set of people as possible.

Present at this gathering were several of the pioneers who
had helped to set the foundation for the developing cybernetic
revolution. What was the revolution they were describing?

John Pierce, a pioneer in electronics research at Bell Labs,
was one of the speakers at the MIT Centennial Conference. In an
article published several years earlier in Scientific American,
Pierce described the foundation of the cybernetic revolution that
was then unfolding.(3) Pierce noted the intellectual ferment that
accompanied two publications in 1948. One was "The Mathematical
Theory of Communication" by Claude Shannon, published in July and
October 1948 in the Bell Labs Journal. The other was the
publication of Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics: Control and
Communication in the Animal and the Machine.

Summing up Shannon's contribution, Pierce noted that Shannon
had changed communication theory from guess work to science.
Shannon, Pierce wrote, "has made it possible for communication
engineers to distinguish between what is possible and what is not
possible. Communication theory has disposed of unworkable
inventions that are akin to perpetual motion machines. It has
directed the attention of engineers to real and soluble problems.
It has given them a quantative measure of the effectiveness of
their system."(4)

In the 1930's, the mathematician and computer pioneer, Alan
Turing had determined that it was possible to design a universal
or general purpose computer. Such a computer would be able to solve any
calculation that could be solved by a machine, provided the computer
had a program describing the calculation. Building on Turing's
contribution, Shannon had demonstrated how Boolean algebra and
logic could be used in the analysis and synthesis of switching
and computer circuits.

Another founder of the Cybernetics Revolution was Norbert Wiener.
Pierce recalled the important intellectual catalyst that Wiener's book
provided when it appeared in 1948. Wiener was interested in the means by
which feedback could be communicated to help correct the problems that
develop in an organism. Describing the contribution Wiener's work made in
defining the need for feedback, Pierce gives the example of a community
"where the Lords of Things as They Are protect themselves from hunger by
wealth, from public opinion by privacy and anonymity, from private
criticism by the laws of libel and the possession of the means of
communication." It is in such a society, he explains, that "ruthlessness
can reach its most sublime levels." And he points out that the creation
of such a society requires "the control of the means of communication" as
"the most effective and important" element."(5) Such a community, he
observed, is very unstable.

Wiener, in an interview in 1959, explained why such a community is
unstable. Describing the importance of accurate information and feedback,
Wiener referred to someone driving a car, but "instead of seeing where
you are going, somebody puts a picture in front of you. Clearly, it won't
be very long before you hit the curb. This is true in other spheres.
Facing the contingencies of life depends on adequate and true
information. The more that information is conditioned by the people who
are doing the controlling, the less they will be able to meet
emergencies. In the long run, such a system of misinformation can only
lead to catastrophe," warned Wiener.(6)

In Cybernetics, Wiener defined three central concepts which he
maintains were crucial in any organism or system. They are communication,
control and feedback. Wiener coined the term "cybernetics" to designate
the important role that feedback plays in a communication system. He took
the word from the Greek term "kybernetes" meaning "governor" or
"steersman."(7) Wiener believed that the digital computer had raised the
question of the relationship between the human and the machine, and that
it was necessary to explore that relationship in a scientific manner. He
wrote that what "functions should properly be assigned to these two
agencies" is the crucial question for our times.(8)

Important to Wiener's vision was the understanding that the more
complex the machine, like the developing digital computer, the more, not
less, direction and intelligence were required on the part of its human
partner. Wiener often pointed to the literal way in which the computer
interpreted the data provided to it. He explained the necessity for
increased human guidance and forethought when directing computers:

"Here I must enter a protest against the popular understanding of
computing machines and similar quasimechanical aids. Many people
suppose that they are replacements for intelligence and have cut
down the need for original thought....This is not the case. If
simple devices need simple thought to get the most out of them,
complicated devices need a vastly reinforced level of thought....
Moreover this work cannot be put off until the machines have already
processed their data. It is very rare, and to say the least, by no
means normal, that data that has been thoughtlessly selected can be
organized by an after thought so as to produce significant
results."(9)

In the introduction to Cybernetics, Wiener described some of the
important influences on his development as a scientist and on his
thinking in the field of cybernetics. He told of how in the 1930's, he
was invited to attend a series of private seminars on the scientific
method held by Dr. Arturo Rosenblueth of the Harvard Medical School in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. He and Dr. Rosenbleuth had a common interest in
understanding the scientific method and both believed that science had to
be a collaborative endeavor.(10) Scientists involved in a variety of
fields of study were invited to the seminars to encourage an
interdisciplinary approach to the problems of communication in machine
and animals that those in the seminars explored. Describing the
methodology of the seminars, Wiener writes:

"In those days, Dr. Rosenblueth...conducted a monthly series
of discussion meetings on scientific method. The
participants were mostly young scientists at the Harvard
Medical School, and we would gather for dinner about a round
table in Vanderbilt Hall.... After the meal, somebody
-- either one of our group or an invited guest -- would read
a paper on some scientific topic, generally one in which
questions of methodology were the first consideration, or at
least a leading consideration. The speaker had to run the
gauntlet of an acute criticism, good-natured but
unsparing....Among the former habitues of these meetings
there is more than one of us who feels that they were an
important and permanent contribution to our scientific
unfolding."(11)

Wiener was a member of this group until the onset of WWII ended the
seminars. After the War was over, Wiener began a set of seminars near MIT
modeled on his earlier experience in the seminars with Dr. Rosenblueth.
The post war seminars that Wiener convened were to have an important
influence on the work of several of the pioneers of the upcoming computer
networking revolution.

Jerome Wiesner, another MIT computing pioneer, who later became a
Science Advisor to President Kennedy, described the role Wiener's
seminars played in helping to develop the interdisciplinary tradition of
research at MIT's Research Laboratory for Electronics (known as the RLE).
Wiener's ideas about communication and feedback in man and machine, along
with Shannon's work in information theory "spawned a new vision of
research for everyone interested in communications, including
neurophysiology, speech, and linquistics investigation," wrote Wiesner,
"The work was both theoretical and experimental as well as basic and
applied. It led to exciting new ideas and to their implementation in
practice which "remains a hallmark of the present-day RLE."(12)

Wiesner provides the following account of the seminars that
Wiener set up after WWII:

"In the winter of 1947, Wiener began to speak about holding
a seminar that would bring together the scientists and
engineers who were doing work on what he called
communications. He was launching his vision of cybernetics
in which he regarded signals in any medium, living or
artificial, as the same; dependent on their structure and
obeying a set of universal laws set out by Shannon. In the
spring of 1948, Wiener convened the first of the weekly
meetings that was to continue for several years...The
first meeting reminded me of the tower of Babel, as
engineers, psychologists, philosophers, acousticians,
doctors, mathematicians, neurophysiologists, philosophers,
and other interested people tried to have their say. After
the first meeting, one of us would take the lead each time,
giving a brief summary of his research, usually
accompanied by a running discussion. As time went on, we
came to understand each other's lingo and to understand, and
even believe, in Wiener's view of the universal role of
communications in the universe. For most of us, these
dinners were a seminal experience which introduced us to
both a world of new ideas and new friends, many of whom
became collaborators in later years."(13)

Part II - Interactive Computing, Time-sharing and Human-Computer
Symbiosis

Wiener's stress on interdisciplinary and practical work in the field
of communications helped to set the foundation for the upcoming
developments in digital computers. By the mid 1950's, several members of
the MIT community had been introduced to a new form of computing --
interactive computing -- in their work on the Whirlwind Computer.
Whirlwind research began at MIT in 1947, providing those involved with
important practical experience in digital computing. Whirlwind came on
line around 1950 and was used until 1957 when the MIT Computation Center
began using another vacuum tube computer, the IBM 704.(14) Only when the
Computation Center computer was upgraded to the first transistorized
computer in the IBM family, the IBM 7090, from vacuum tube computers, did
time-sharing become possible.(15)

IBM, which was a main provider of computers during this period,
promoted batch processing and saw it as the form of computing for the
future. Reseachers at MIT, however, had a different vision. Some had
worked on the Whirlwind Computer and had experienced a form of
interactive computing that made it possible to use the computer directly,
rather than having to submit punch cards to a central computer center
and await the results.(16) The experience of real time activity at the
computer had been a significant advance over the frustration of awaiting
the results of one's program under the batch processing system.

Computer resources during this period were very expensive.
In general, the cost prohibited a single person from using a computer
in real time. A few farsighted researchers, however, had the idea of
a time-sharing system which would take advantage of the speed of the
computer to allow several users to work with the computer at the same
time. The computer scheduled their different work in a way that gave
the illusion that the computer was being used by each independently.
In June, 1959, Christopher Strachey, a British researcher, presented a
talk at the International Conference on Info Processing, UNESCO,
proposing time-sharing.(17) Also, in 1959, John McCarthy, an MIT
faculty member, wrote a memo describing a new form of computing
that time-sharing would make possible and proposing that MIT
begin to plan to implement this form of computing once the IBM
7090, the new transistorized computer that they were expecting
from IBM to replace the IBM 704, arrived. McCarthy advocated
developing a "general-purpose system where you could program in
any language you wanted."(18) In his memorandum to MIT Professor
P.M. Morse in January 1959, McCarthy writes:

"This memorandum is based on the assumption that MIT will be
given a transistorized IBM 709 about July 1960. I want to
propose an operating system for it that will substantially
reduce the time required to get a problem solved on the
machine.... The proposal requires a complete revision in the
way the machine is used.... I think the proposal points to
the way all computers will be operated in the future, and we
have a chance to pioneer a big step forward in the way
computers are used."(19)

At the same time as McCarthy was proposing a new form of
computing, -- i.e. time-sharing and interactive computing --
another computer pioneer, J.C.R. Licklider, who would play an
important role in the developing computer revolution, was working
on a paper exploring the concept of human-computer interaction that
Norbert Wiener had stressed was so crucial.

Licklider had done his graduate degree in psychology and after WWII,
did research at Harvard and worked as a lecturer. He attended the postwar
Wiener circles. "At that time," he explained in an interview, "Norbert
Wiener ran a circle that was very attractive to people all over
Cambridge, and Tuesday nights I went to that. I got acquainted with a lot
of people at MIT."(20) He describes how another importance influence on
his work was the Summer Projects at MIT that he attended, starting in
1951. Beginning in the summer of 1952, an interdisciplinary series of
summer projects were carried on at MIT for several years which Licklider
found "exhilarating." He remembered how "they brought together all these
people -- physicians, mathematicians. You would go one day and there
would be John von Neumann, and the next day there would be Jay Forrester
having the diagram of a core memory in his pocket and stuff -- it was
fantastically exciting."(21)

Licklider became involved with MIT and Lincoln Laboratory and
"computers and radar sets and communications." As their token
psychologist, he was the only psychologist in this interdisciplinary
group of physicists, mathematicians and engineers. "So it was a fantastic
opportunity," he noted. The lab he worked at was run by the RLE and he
described how it "gave me a kind of access to the most marvelous
electronics there was."(22)

By 1958-9, Licklider was working with the engineering company,
Bolt, Beranek and Newman doing acoustical research. There he had access
to digital computers, first a Royal McBee LGP-30, and then one of the
earliest DEC PDP-1 computers. Licklider learned how to program on the
LGP-30 and when the PDP-1 arrived, one of the earliest time-sharing
systems was created for it. Licklider notes the grand time he had
exploring what it made possible:

"Well, it turned out that these guys at MIT and BBN. We'd
all gotten really excited about interactive computing and we
had a kind of little religion growing here about how an
was going to be totally different from batch processing."(23)

It was during this period that Licklider carried out an
experiment to try to determine how the computer could aid him in
his intellectual work. "More significantly," he explained, "from
my point of view, a lot hinged on a little study I had made on
how I would spend my time. It showed that almost all my time was
spent on algorithmic things that were no fun, but they were all
necessary for the few heuristic things that seemed to be
important. I had this little picture in my mind of how we were
going to get people and computers to really think together."(24)

Inspired by the Wiener seminars, Licklider tried to set up an
interdisciplinary study circle to conduct a study for the Air Force.
He explains:

"Oh, yes. We had a project with the Air Force Office of
Scientific Research to develop the systems concept. Now it's
corny, but then it was an interesting concept. We were
trying to figure out what systems meant to the engineer and
the scientific world. That involved some meetings in which
we brought [together] good thinkers in several fields. We
wanted a kind of Wiener circle....we put a lot of hours into
trying to do that."(25)

This study is described in the article "Man-Computer Symbiosis".
Norbert Wiener had proposed that man-computer symbiosis was a subset of
the man-computer relationship. Licklider took that observation seriously
and wrote an article which was published in March 1960 exploring the
meaning and import of man-computer interaction and interdependence.

"Man-computer symbiosis," he wrote, "is an expected
development in cooperative interaction between man and electronic
computers. It will involve very close coupling between the human
and electronic members of the partnership. The main aims," he
outlined, "are 1) to let computers facilitate formulative
thinking as they now facilitate the solution of formulated
problems, and 2) to enable man and computers to cooperate in
making decisions and controlling complex situations without
inflexible dependence on predetermined programs."(26)

The article became an important formulation of a vision of
computing for the developing computer revolution in time-sharing
and networking. Licklider did not promote the computer as a
replacement for humans nor see humans as servants to computers.
Instead he proposed research exploring the role of humans and
machines. His goal was to enhance the symbiotic relationship
between the human and computer partners needed to aid
intellectual activity.

Part III - CTSS and Project MAC

One of those who was to play an important role in implementing the
vision of human-computer symbiosis was Robert Fano. Fano worked at RLE
after doing his Ph.D. at MIT in June 1947. In his introduction to his
book "Transmission of Information", he described his early contact with
Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon.(27) He explained how he studied the
theoretical questions raised by Wiener and Shannon and did research to
explore the theories they had pioneered.

In 1960, Fano was a senior faculty member at MIT. Gordon
Brown, then Dean of the Engineering School of MIT, arranged for
several faculty members to take a course in computing taught by
Fernando Corbato and John McCarthy. Fano, remembering his
excitement in learning how to program during this course,
recalled, "I wrote a program that worked." (28)

Gordon Brown, according to Fano, understood that the
computer was going to be very important and encouraged his senior
faculty to become familiar with it. In 1960, the MIT administration
appointed a committee to make recommendations about the future needs
of MIT regarding computers. Fano was one of the faculty members appointed
to the committee. This committee created a technical committee made up
of Fernando Corbato, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Doug Ross,
and Jack Dennis, with Herb Teager acting as Chair. This committee
became known as The Long Term Computation Study Group.

It was during this period that the celebration of the MIT centennial
was being planned. Eight talks were scheduled. After one of the speakers
cancelled at the last minute, John McCarthy, who had been working on the
long range computer study, was invited to speak. In his talk, McCarthy
described the rationale behind time-sharing and the important vision for
the future of computing that it represented. Other participants at the
conference included Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, John Kemeny, Robert
Fano, Alan Perlis, and J.C.R. Licklider.(29) In the course of the
conference, Wiener explained that "a computing machine is a general-
purpose device that can be programmed to do very specific jobs." But,
Wiener warned, if you fail to give a necessary instruction to a computer,
"you cannot expect the machine itself to think of this restriction."(30)
Wiener explained that humans had to oversee the computer. "An unsafe act
thus," Wiener cautioned, "may not show its danger until it is too late to
do anything about it."(31)

In his comments, Licklider described how a human being
"must not so clutter his mind with codes and formats that he
cannot think about his substantative problem."(32) Licklider
described his vision of the future of the computer:

"In due course it will be part of the formulation of
problems; part of real-time thinking, problem solving, doing
of research, conducting of experiments, getting into the
literature and finding references...And it will mediate and
facilitate communication among human beings."(33)

He expressed his hope that the computer "through its
contribution to formulative thinking...will help us understand
the structure of ideas, the nature of intellectual
processes."(33) And he proposed that the "most important present
function of the digital computer in the university should be to
catalyze the development of computer science."(35)

Another participant at the conference, the linquist Y. Bar-
Hillel, pointed out no one at the conference knew what was going
to happen in the long term future, or even in the short term.
Because of this uncertainty, it was important to decide what type
of future it would be worthwhile to encourage. There were two
paths to choose from, and he posed the question as to which path
should be taken. "Do we want computers that will compete with human
beings and achieve intelligent behavior autonomously, or do we want
what has been called man-machine symbiosis?"(36)

"I think computer people have the obligation to decide which of the
two aims they are going to adopt," he proposed. Arguing that the human
brain was more developed than it would be possible to make a machine
brain at the current stage of technological development, he recommended
that the best path was that of man-machine symbiosis. "I admit that these
two aims do not definitely exclude each other," he acknowledged, "but
there has been an enormous waste during the last few years in trying to
achieve what I regard as the wrong aim at this stage, namely, computers
that will autonomously work as well as the human brain with its billion
years of evolution."

Fano, taking a sabbatical in the Summer of 1961, had gone to work at
Lincoln Labs because he hoped to learn more about digital computers
there. "You know," he explained, "we used to talk about components such
as modulators and detectors and all the gadgets that went into
communication systems. That's the past. We have to talk about functions
now, because with a computer you can implement any function you
want."(37) He proposed one had to begin to think about communication in
the general purpose way that the digital computer was making possible.

In the meantime, the Long Term Computation Study Group
published its reports. There were two proposals for how to
proceed. One, from Herbert Teager, who had been Chairman of the
Committee, and a second Report from the rest of the committee.
Fernando Corbato, a member of the committee and then Associate
Director of the MIT Computing Center set out to implement an
"interim" solution to the kind of computing the majority report
proposed. Corbato describes the subsequent events, "I started up
with just a couple of my staff people Marjorie Daggett...and Bob
Daley. We hammered out a very primitive prototype. We started
thinking about it in Spring of 1961. I remember that by the
summer of 1961 we were in the heat of trying to work out the
intricacies of the interrupts."(38)

He explains how he and the other programmers were acting
on the vision that had been developed by the majority of the Long
Term Study Group Committee. "I sketched out what we would try to
do," he explains, "and Marjorie, Daley and I worked out the hairy
details of trying to cope with this kind of poor hardware. By
November, 1961," he notes, "we were able to demonstrate a really
crude prototype of the system."(39)

They gave a seminar and demonstration with their prototype
time-sharing system in November 1961. "That's the date that's
branded in my mind," Corbato notes. "It was only a four-Flexowriter
system. People were pleased that there were finally examples
surfacing from [the work]. They did not view [it] as an answer
to anybody's problem. We made the [first] demo in November 1961
on an [IBM] 709," he recalls. "The switch to the [IBM] 7090
occurred in the spring of 1962 at the Computation Center."(40)

Corbato describes how CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System), as the
time-sharing system he was working on was called, couldn't go into
operation until the transistorized IBM 7090 hardware had arrived and
could be used in early spring of 1962.(41) Only then could they begin to
deal with the real problems to make a working system.

Corbato gave a talk at a Conference about CTSS in May, 1962,
but they still didn't have a working system running. By October,
1962, however, J.C.R. Licklider had accepted a position with ARPA
under the U.S. Department of Defense on his condition that he
would be allowed to implement the vision of interactive computing
and time-sharing.

In November, 1962, Licklider and Fano both attended an
unclassified meeting held for the Air Force in Hot Springs,
Virginia. Fano had been invited to chair a session on
Communications, and he and Licklider both attended some of the
sessions on command and control. On the way back from the
conference, on the train returning to Washington D.C., several
people from the meeting were in the same car. They all chatted
about what had happened and moved from seat to seat to talk to
different people. "And I did spend quite a bit of time with
Lick," Fano recalled, "and I understood better what he had in
mind."(42)

Fano spent Thanksgiving Day 1962 thinking over the
discussion he had had with Licklider. The day after Thanksgiving
he had a meeting set up with the Provost at MIT, Charlie Townes.
When he told the Provost what he had been thinking, the Provost
told Fano, "Go ahead." Fano wrote out his thoughts in a 2 page
memorandum that he distributed broadly around MIT. In the proposal,
he put forward three goals: 1) time-sharing 2) a community using it
and 3) education, which meant supporting research projects.

The following Tuesday, Fano met with Jay [Julius A] Stratton, then
President of MIT. Fano was surprised that Stratton asked him which
building he would use for the project, encouraging him to begin to
implement his proposal.

In reviewing the period, Corbato described how Licklider
went to ARPA "as a `Johnny Appleseed' with a mission" and that
that was more than his superiors had expected. They tolerated it,
Corbato observed, but Licklider was "the one who was driving it
rather than them."(43) Lick added that while his superiors called
for Command and Control, he made clear he was going to be involved
with "interactive computing."(44) "I just wanted to make it clear," Lick
noted, "that I wasn't going to be running battle planning missions or
something. I was going to be dealing with the engineering substratum that
[would] make it possible to do that stuff [command and control]."

Fano developed a funding proposal for Project MAC. It was submitted
to ARPA. The contract was signed on July 1, 1963, the day the 1963 summer
study began at MIT to demonstrate and create enthusiasm for time-sharing
and interactive computing. "Time-sharing," Martin Greenberger recalled,
"on the Computation Center machine was available on the opening day of
the summer study project."(45)

When asked how he felt when he learned that there would be funding to
develop CTSS as part of Project MAC, Corbato recalled, "Well, it was a
cooperative thing. Nobody had license to run wild -- but you had license
to try to make something happen."(46) Corbato clarified, "I wasn't trying
to start a company or anything like that; my goal was to exhibit it."

By mid October a second time-sharing computer was available
for Project MAC. And it was operating within a week.

Reviewing the reasons for the success of Project MAC,
Greenberger explained, "CTSS was an open system. It challenged
the user to design his own subsystem, no matter what discipline
he came from, no matter what his research interests."(47)

Fano significantly pointed out that one of the goals of Project MAC
had not been achieved. This goal identified an important technical and
social need that would inspire future networking developments. The ever
developing and changing computer hardware and software posed the
challenge of providing a support network for users, both locally and
remotely. "One of our goals," Fano explained, "was to make the computer
truly accessible to people wherever they were. We did not succeed. For
people who lived in the community that used the system, it was fine. In
any system like that, you keep learning things, you keep using new
things, and so you keep having troubles. If you can go next door and say,
`Hey, I was doing this and something strange happened, do you know what I
did wrong?' usually somebody in your neighborhood will be able to help
you. If instead you are far away, you are stuck....We tried to develop
some way of helping remote users....Well, we never did. So in fact, we
failed to make the computer truly accessible regardless of the location
of the user."(48)

Despite the problems, Greenberger observed, "I think one of
the greatest successes was that CTSS gave so many people, with
such widely different backgrounds, a system and experience that
they would not have gotten any other way at that point." Fano
explained the importance of developing time-sharing was not just
in developing something technical. Rather, he noted, "I am really
talking about the interaction of users in the sharing. That's
important," he emphasized, "I feel that systems that do this
as easily as time-sharing systems do not exist."(49) Remembering
how Project MAC created an on-line community, Fano recalled,
"friendships being born out of using somebody else's program,
people communicating through the system and then meeting by accident
and say `Oh, that's you.' All sorts of things. It was a nonreproducible
community phenomenon," he concluded. (50)

Offering his summary of the achievements, Corbato
explained: "Two aspects strike me as being important. One is the
kind of open system quality, which allowed everyone to make the
system kind of their thing rather than what somebody else imposed
on them....So people were tailoring it to mesh with their
interests. And the other thing is, I think, we deliberately kept
the system model relatively unsophisticated (maybe that's the
wrong word - uncomplicated), so we could explain it easily."(51)

The achievements of Project MAC and the other time-sharing systems
built as a result of Licklider's tenure at ARPA provided the basis for
the vision that would guide the development of the ARPANET.(52) In the
paper, "The Computer as a Communication Device," Licklider and Robert
Taylor predicted, "In a few years, men will be able to communicate more
effectively through a machine than face to face...We believe that we are
entering into a technological age, in which we will be able to interact
with the richness of living information -- not merely in the passive way
that we have become accustomed to using books and libraries, but as
active participants in an ongoing process, bringing something to it
through our interaction with it, and not simply receiving something from
it by our connection to it."(53)

While they acknowledged that technical uses like the switching
function were important in the transfer of information, such uses were
not the aspect they were interested in. Instead they proposed that there
was a power and responsiveness that online interaction with a computer
made possible that would significantly affect the communication possible
between humans using the computer.

Though they were familiar with commercial time-sharing
facilities that called themselves "multiaccess," they explained
that these had not succeeded in creating the kind of multiaccess
computer communities that the academic and research time-sharing
systems spawned.

They described these time-sharing communities, of which
Project MAC was one of the early examples, as "socio-technical
pioneers...out ahead of the rest of the computer world." They
attributed this to the fact that some of the members of these
online communities were computer scientists and engineers who
understood both the concept of human computer interaction and the
technology of interactive, multiaccess systems. Among the
members of these online communities were creative people in
different fields and disciplines who recognized the potential
value of these multiaccess communities to their work. Thirdly,
the online communities had access to large multiaccess computers
and knew how to use them. Fourthly, they maintained that the
efforts of those online had a regenerative effect.(54)

Elaborating on what they meant by regenerative, they wrote, that in
the half dozen time-sharing on-line communities in existence during the
1960s, those doing research and development of computer systems and
applications provided mutual support for each other. The product was a
growing quantity of resources including programs, data, and technical
know how. "But we have seen only the beginning," they predicted, "There
is much more programming and data collection -- and much more learning
how to cooperate -- to be done before the full potential of the concept
can be realized." They go on to caution that these systems could only be
developed interactively. And they explain that, "The systems being built
must remain flexible and open-ended throughout the process of
development, which is evolutionary."(55)

They also describe how there were systems that were advertising
themselves via the same labels as "interactive," "time-sharing" and
"multiaccess." But these were commercial systems and they found that
there were distinct differences between the commercial systems and the
academic and research time-sharing ones. The commercial systems did not
offer the same "power", "flexibility" of software resources and the
general purposeness that the research and academic time-sharing system at
MIT, UCB, Stanford and SDC had made available to over 1000 people for a
number of years.(56)

They discussed their vision of the future, predicting that linking
up the existing online communities would create a still more powerful
and important development -- online supercommunities made up of the
existing communities created by the time-sharing systems. "The hope,"
they explained, "is that interconnection will make available to all the
communities the programs and data resources of the entire
supercommunity." They predicted that the future would bring "a mobile
network of networks -- ever changing in both content and configuration."
And just as Licklider and Taylor realized that a time-sharing system was
more than a collection of computers and software, Fano recognized that a
time-sharing system was more than just a set of people using common
resources; it was also a means of communicating and sharing ideas.(57)

Another time-sharing pioneer, Doug Ross, observed that
Project MAC made CTSS available rather than waiting for the ideal
technical system to be developed, as others had favored. By producing
a prototype and encouraging others to contribute to it, CTSS had a
significant impact on others who, therefore, had the ability to build
into the system what they needed and to contribute so it would serve
their needs. "I always say," Ross concluded, "you can't design an
interface from just one side."(58) This quality of putting an open
system out and encouraging people to contribute to it to make it what
they needed, was building a human centered rather than technology
centered system.(59)

Summing up the achievement of the Project MAC pioneers,
John A. N. Lee, editor of two special issues of The IEEE
Annals of the History of Computing which document the development
of time-sharing and Project MAC at MIT, writes: "With the
development of computer networking, which almost naturally
followed on the development of time-sharing and interactive
computing, it is as if the whole world now time shares myriad
computers, providing facilities which were beyond the dreams of
even the MIT researchers of 1960...But this is where it started
-- with the ideas of John McCarthy, the implementation skills of
Fernando Corbato, the vision of J.C.R. Licklider, and the
organizational skills of Robert Fano."(60)

Part IV - The Implications

The pioneers of cybernetics and multiaccess computing who
gathered at the MIT centennial in the Spring of 1961 to discuss
the future of computing proposed that the crucial issue one must
determine in trying to solve a problem is how to formulate the
question. They expressed concern that the computer would bring
great changes into our world and that people who understood the
issues involved be part of setting government policy regarding
these developments.

The pioneers also observed that there were opposing visions
of what the future should be. One road was that of human-computer
symbiosis, of a close interaction between the human and the computer
so each could function more effectively. "The hope is that, in not
too many years," J.C.R. Licklider wrote, "human brains and computing
machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the
resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever
thought and process data in a way not approached by the
information-handling machines we know today."(61) The other road
was that of creating computers that would be able to do the
thinking or problem solving without human assistance. Pioneers
like Licklider explained that "man-computer symbiosis is
probably not the ultimate paradigm for complex technological
systems" and that in the future at some point "electronic or
chemical `machines' will outdo the human brain in most of the
functions we now consider exclusively within its province." He
maintained, however, that, "there will nevertheless be a fairly
long interim during which the main intellectual advances will be made
by men and computers working together in intimate association."(62)
Though Licklider was willing to concede, "dominance in the distant
future of celebration to machines alone," he recognized the creative
and important developments that the partnership between the human
and computer would make possible. He predicted that the years of
human-computer symbiosis, "should be intellectually the most
creative and exciting in the history of mankind."(63)

In the years following the development of CTSS and Project MAC and
the linking of different time-sharing systems to create a super-community
of on-line communities which became known as the ARPANET, the firm
foundation set by CTSS and Project MAC and the helpful vision and
direction set by Licklider and Fano and other pioneers of the period,
gave birth to the sprawling and impressive networking communities that
today we call the Internet and Usenet.

The pioneers of time-sharing and interactive computing provided a
vision of human-computer symbiosis as an intellectual advance for humans.
Online human-computer, and computer facilitated human to human
communication was seen as the embodiment of this symbiosis. The vision of
the computer pioneers of the 1960's, of human-computer symbiosis, and of
creating a multiaccess, interactive, network of networks, or a super
community network as they termed it, is the vision that can still
fruitfully guide the work to build and extend the global computer network
in the U.S. and around the world today.
-----------------------------------------------
Notes for CHAPTER 6

(1) "The Project MAC Interviews," IEEE Annals of the History of
Computing, Vol 14 no 2, 1992, p. 15. The interviews were conducted
on October 18, 1988. They were in two group interviews/recollection
exchanges. The interviewers were John A. N. Lee and Robert Rosin. The
participants were Fernando J. Corbato, Robert M. Fano, Martin
Greenberger, Joseph C.R. Licklider, Douglas T. Ross and Allan L.
Scherr.

(2) Martin Greenberger, ed, Management and Computers of Future,
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1962, p. 8.

(3) John R. Pierce, "Communication," Scientific American, Vol 227
no 3, September, 1972.

(4) Ibid., p. 33.

(5) Ibid., p. 41.

(6) "Challenge Interview: Norbert Wiener: Man and the Machine", June
1959, in Collected Works of Norbert Wiener with Commentaries, Vol 4,
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1985, p. 717.

(7) Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication
in the Animal and the Machine, The MIT Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1948, pp. 11-12. Wiener wrote, "In choosing this
term, we wish to recognize that the first significant paper on
feedback mechanisms is an article on governors, which was published
by Clerk Maxwell in 1868....We also wish to refer to the fact that
the steering engines of a ship are indeed one of the earliest and
best-developed forms of feedback mechanisms."

(8) God and Golem, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, p. 71.

(9) "A Scientist's Dilemma in a Materialist World," by Norbert
Wiener, in Collected Works, Vol 4, p. 709.

(10) Norbert Wiener, I Am A Mathematician, The MIT Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1956, p. 171.

(11) Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, p. 1.

(12) From "The Legacy of Norbert Wiener: A Centennial Symposium,"
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1994, p. 19. Licklider, Fano, Minsky and
other MIT pioneers refer to the important influence that being part
of the RLE had on their subsequent work.

(13) Ibid.

(14) One of the reasons that a computer using vacuum tubes
was not appropriate for a time-sharing system, according to
Robert Fano, was that the "mean time between failures was
seven or nine [hours]." See IEEE Annals of the History of
Computing, Vol 14 no 2, 1992, p. 25.

(15) Chronology from IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol 14
no 1, 1994, p. 18. (Here after, Annals)

(16) See Annals, Vol 14 no 1, 1992, p. 38 for a description
of the frustrations of batch processing.

(17) See Strachey, C. "Time sharing in large fast computers,"
Proc Int. Conf. on Info Processing, UNESCO, June, 1959, pp. 336-
341. See also Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month,
Essays on Software Engineering, Reading, Massachusetts, 1972,
p. 146.

(18) See Annals, Vol 14, no. 1, 1992, "John McCarthy's 1959
Memorandum," pp. 20-21. See also J.A.N. Lee "Claims to the Term
Time-Sharing", ibid, p. 16-17.

(19) "John McCarthy's 1959 Memorandum", p. 20.

(20) Annals, vol. 14, no. 2, 1992, p. 16.

(21) Ibid.

(22) Ibid.

(23) Interview by William Aspray and Arthur L. Norberg, Tape
recording, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 28 October 1988, OH 150,
Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis,
Minnesota.

(24) J.C.R. Licklider, "Man-Computer Symbiosis", IRE Transactions
on Human Factors in Electronics, Vol HFE-1, pp. 4-11, March, 1960.
Reprinted in In Memoriam: J.C.R. Licklider 1915-1990, Digital
Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, California, August 7, 1990, pp.
1-19.

(25) Ibid.

(26) Ibid., p. 1.

(27) Robert Fano, Transmission of Information, MIT Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, p. .

(28) "An Interview with ROBERT M. FANO," Conducted by Arthur L. Norberg
on 20-21 April 1989, Cambridge, MA, Charles Babbage Institute,
Center for the History of Information Processing, University of
Minnesota, Minneapolis

(29) The book was first published under the title Management and
the Future of the Computer by The MIT Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, in 1962 and later in hardback and paperback under the
title Computers and the World of the Future. It was edited by Martin
Greenberger.

(30) Ibid., p. 24.

(31) Ibid., p. 32.

(32) Ibid., pp. 204-5.

(33) Ibid., p. 205.

(34) Ibid., p. 206.

(35) Ibid., p. 207.

(36) Ibid., p. 324.

(37) Annals, Vol 14 no 2, 1992, p. 20.

(38) Annals, Vol 14 no 1, 1992, p. 44. Teager's recommendations are
described on pages 24-27. Excerpts from the Long Range Computation
Study Group's recommendation for a time-sharing systems which
resulted in Corbato's work on CTSS are in the same issue on pages
28-30.

(39) "What we had done was [that] we had wedged out 5K words of
the user address space and inserted a little operating
system that was going to manage the four typewriters. We did
not have any disk storage, so we took advantage of the fact
that it was a large machine and we had a lot of tape drives.
We assigned one tape drive per typewriter." Ibid., p. 45.

(40) Ibid., pp.45-46. Corbato describes how he thought CTSS would
be running on the IBM 7090 by the time he was to give a talk on it
at the AFIPS Spring Joint Computer Conference in May, 1962. But
that they were not able to get it running by the time the paper
was presented. Despite his disappointment, the paper is an
important historical document. See "An Experimental Time-Sharing
System," by Fernando J. Corbato, Marjorie Merwin-Daggett, Robert
C. Daley, Proceedings of the American Federation of Information
Processing Societies, Spring Joint Computer Conference, May 1-3,
1962, Vol 21, pp. 335-344.

(41) It was called the Compatible Time-Sharing System as it was developed
in the Computation Center and so had to be compatible with the batch
system running there.

(42) Annals, Vol 14 no 2, pp. 21-22.

(43) Ibid., p. 24

(44) Ibid.

(45) Ibid., p. 26. Fano explained that Licklider wanted interactive computing
with time-sharing. He notes that "one was the `tool' the other the
`goal'. This is where the name MAC came from. There was a goal and
there was a tool -- the tool that was most appropriate at that
time." He goes on to explain that there had been the vision on the
part of people like John McCarthy and later Licklider "of what could
come out of it when you started building a computer utility. It
didn't exist then. It didn't exist until the time of Project MAC
because it was just that year that Corby finished the model that
really could serve a community. It didn't exist before." Ibid.,
p. 23.

(46) Ibid. p. 26.

(47) Ibid. Greenberger describes how he designed a subsystem for CTSS
where students created a set of commands to simulate stock market,
accounting, production scheduling, online modeling, etc. They put
these commands together into a system under CTSS that they called
OPS, (On-line Programming and Simulation). Ibid., p. 27.

(48) Ibid., p. 31.

(49) Ibid., p. 35.

(50) Ibid.

(51) Ibid., p. 33.

(52) By Fall, 1967, there were 35 time-sharing systems operational
or planned, at research and academic sites, mainly in the U.S.,
according to the "Time-Sharing System Scorecard." ("Prolog to the
Future", Annals, Vol 14, no 2, p. 42-47.) The scorecard also lists
15 commercial time-sharing installations being planned or in
existence.

(53) "The Computer as a Communication Device," IRE Transactions
on Human Factors in Electronics, volume HFE-1, pages 4-11, March
1960, as reprinted in "In Memoriam: J.C.R. Licklider: 1915-
1990", Palo Alto, August 7, 1990, p. 21.

(54) Ibid., pp. 30-31.

(55) Ibid., p. 31.

(56) The time-sharing systems they are describing are listed in the
"Time-Sharing System Scorecard" as having been begun in the
following years:
MIT [Project MAC at MIT begun in May, 1963],
UCB [Project GENIE at the University of California at Berkeley
begun in April, 1965],
Stanford University [Stanford, California begun in August, 1964],
and SDC [Systems Development Corporation in Santa Monica, California,
begun in August, 1964].

(57) Corbato explains that Robert Fano "correctly saw that a time-sharing
system was more than just a set of people using common resources; it
was also a means of communicating and sharing ideas." Annals, Vol 14
no 1, p. 48.

(58) Ibid., p. 51.

(59) Annals, Vol 14, no 2, one of the interviewers, Robert Rosin noted,
"You see, if what you're trying to do is optimize technical resources
(physical resources), Herb's point of view was exactly right. If
you try to optimize the use of human resources, then the point of
view you were taking was a lot closer to reality."

(60) Annals, Vol 14, no 1, p. 3-4.

(61) "Man Computer Symbiosis," p. 3. Licklider proposes the role
that each partner will play in the symbiotic relationship. The
human partner will "set the goals, formulate the hypotheses,
determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations." The
computers "will do the routinizable work that must be done to
prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and
scientific thinking." p. 1.

(62) Ibid., pp. 2-3.

(63) Ibid.
--------

MAC is an acronym that has had several explanations, including
Machine Aided Cognition, MAN and Computer and Minsky against
Corbato, according to Peter Elias, in the 25th Anniversary
Project MAC Time Line.
--------

Thanks to Tom Van Vleck, Alex McKenzie and to Fernando Corbato for
pointing out sources that were helpful in doing the research for this
paper. Also, thanks to Scott Dorsey who suggested I try to find out about
Project MAC. Another source which covers this material in a way that is
helpful is "The Evolution of Interactive Computing Through Time-Sharing
and Networking" by Judy Elizabeth O'Neill, June 1992. The interviews in
the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing Special Issues (Vol 14 no 1
and no 2) are an important source of information about the period. They
are supplemented by interviews that are available from the Charles
Babbage Institute.
 

Last Updated: August 11, 1996

===============================================================

This article is a draft chapter from Michael Hauben's
<hauben@columbia.edu> and Ronda Hauben's <rh120@columbia.edu> netbook
titled "Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet."
*Commercial use is prohibited*

Please send us any comments about this draft. Send comments to
both hauben@columbia.edu and rh120@columbia.edu.