Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
of information processing, and in
, the Information Processing
Techniques Office (IPTO) was formed under the leadership of
J.C.R. Licklider.
One of Licklider's concerns was what he called, in a
1962
paper,
'man-computer symbiosis'.
27
This involved finding ways of inte-
grating the machine with human operators that went beyond the
automation model. It involved work not just in AI, but also on time-
sharing, interactive computing and networking. In the late '
1960
s John
McCarthy, one of the pioneers of Artificial Intelligence, developed
the concept of time-sharing. This involved the computer dealing
with the work of many users at once by cycling through sections
of each user's processes very rapidly. By allotting an infinitesimal
amount of time to each task in succession, users could be given the
impression that they alone had control of the computer. Time-
sharing had a number of important effects on computing, not just
in practical technological terms, but also in how it was understood
and interacted with. The user now interacted with the computer
in terms of a private personal engagement. He or she was given
the sense of the machine actually being his or hers personally.
This represented a decisive shift in computing, towards a model of
one-to-one engagement. Time-sharing required the development
of other technologies such as graphic displays, such as the General
Purpose Graphics Display System, in effect a graphical user interface
which used symbols, thus anticipating the graphical user interface
systems employed by Apple and Microsoft several decades later.
Licklider also discovered and funded the work of Ivan Sutherland,
who succeeded Licklider as director of IPTO, and who had been a
PhD student of Claude Shannon's while at Lincoln Laboratory.
Lincoln Laboratory was top-secret facility connected to MIT and
responsible for much of the work on SAGE. For part of his PhD
Sutherland employed technology developed at Lincoln, such as
cathode ray displays and light pens, and, in
50
1962
, built 'Sketchpad'
(illus.
18
), an interactive graphics program whose influence was
