The writings of Jorge Luis Borges twist our perception of time and space. In between articles about Shaw, Chesterton, Wilde, and Coleridge, his 1952 book “Otras Inquisiciones” included an unexpected gem: a short story called “El Tiempo y J. W. Dunne”. The question is, who was this John William Dunne and what does he have to do with time? Well, his name might be forgotten by contemporary audiences, but Dunne was the author of one of the biggest bestsellers of the first half of the twentieth century.
Dunne, aviator, engineer, and philosopher according to Wikipedia, published in 1927 the influential book “An Experiment with Time”, in which Dunne explains that not only precognitive dreams happen… but we can also analyze them and understand them, gaining some knowledge about the future in the process.
Or, to put it in a TikTok-friendly manner: manifestation is a thing.
More seriously; Borges says à propos of Dunne:
Los teólogos definen la eternidad como la simultánea y lúcida posesión de todos los instantes del tiempo y la declaran uno de los atributos divinos. Dunne, asombrosamente, supone que ya es nuestra la eternidad y que los sueños de cada noche lo corroboran.
Which translated in English would read as such:
Theologians define eternity as the simultaneous and lucid possession of all moments in time and declare it one of the divine attributes. Dunne, astonishingly, assumes that eternity is already ours and that our dreams each night corroborate this.
Did Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (1915-1990) read “An Experiment in Time”? Could it be that he had a series of dreams between 1960 and 1968, and that he quickly wrote them down in his diary before breakfast? We can only speculate. But we do know for a fact that those dreams begat a nothing short of extraordinary sequence of writings: “Man-Computer Symbiosis” (1960); “Intergalactic Computer Network” (1963); “Libraries of the Future” (1965); and “The Computer as a Communication Device”, this last one from a dream he shared with Bob Taylor, and published in 1968.
In all of these manifestations works, Lick (as he was commonly referred to, and you know that we like to sound cool and be familiar with our celebrities in this magazine) explored and exposed the possibilities and the wonders of not only giving each person a computer, but also, and most important of all, of connecting all of those computers together in a common network.
Lick was the OG dream machine, all right. To such an extent, that the J. C. R. Licklider paper collection, set up by MIT after Lick’s death in 1990 with the help of his family, has a volume of 25 cubic feet (around 0.7 cubic meters), much of which has not been entirely reviewed. For the rest of us without access to the MIT vault, an ad hoc collection of Lick’s related papers is available on the Internet Archive.
Precisely, the story of Lick’s dreams, their extent and impact, and how they became a reality (but sadly not whether he wrote them down before breakfast or not) is the subject of the monumental work of M. Mitchell Waldrop, “The Dream Machine”, originally published in 2001. It was re-released by Stripe Press in 2018 in a stunning volume that includes not only the original text, but also the contents of three of Lick writings enumerated above (that is, all except “Libraries of the Future”).
It was a vision that was downright Jeffersonian in its idealism, and perhaps in its naïveté as well. Nonetheless, Lick insisted, “the renewed hope I referred to is more than just a feeling in the air… It is a feeling one experiences at the console. The information revolution is bringing with it a key that may open the door to a new era of involvement and participation. The key is the self-motivating exhilaration that accompanies truly effective interaction with information and knowledge through a good console connected through a good network to a good computer”.
(Waldrop, page 401.)
When we say monumental, you had better believe it; the 500+ pages of this volume, laid out with astonishing detail (and a very small font size) summarize the history and evolution of computers from 1945 to 1990. Throughout these pages, Waldrop reveals that the backbone, the axis, the arrow, the orientation, the mastermind of all that history was none other than Lick himself: he was the incarnation of the phrase “being at the right place at the right time”.
Speaking about personification: in a theme dear to this magazine, we cannot but acknowledge that Lick embodied the fight against the impossible dialogue between engineering and business. He was a psychologist and a computer scientist. He understood the minds of humans and those of computers alike. Lick was the thread and the needle, shaping the path from Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, and John von Neumann, to the World Wide Web, Object-Oriented Programming, and the home office.
Why deny it, he was also the purse and the wallet along the path, having used his influence in BBN, MIT, ARPA, and anywhere he could, to fund those around him working on the bits and pieces required to bring his dream to life. Imagine the privilege of being able to sign checks with such nonchalance.
Paraphrasing some famous credit card advertising slogan: having ideas is great. Having cash to make them happen is priceless.
“The Dream Machine” appeared merely months after Michael Hiltzik’s “Dealers of Lightning” hit the shelves; in many ways, Waldrop’s book is an extended version of Hiltzik’s, both backwards and forwards in time. To the extent that a full chapter in “The Dream Machine” (number eight, to be precise) is dedicated to Xerox PARC, giving a much better context to its creation than Hiltzik’s work can, albeit with slightly less detail (easy, since after all, Hiltzik’s subject is narrower in scope).
Waldrop’s acknowledges this himself in page 419, speaking about the now legendary visit of Steve Jobs to PARC in December 1979:
Nonetheless, Hiltzik’s book includes perhaps the most careful and complete reconstruction of the event to date, and it makes a number of key points. First, Jobs and his crew didn’t need a special presentation to learn about graphical user interfaces. That idea was already in the air by 1979, along with everything else PARC had done.
In any case, both books complement each other wonderfully. (OK, OK, OK; if you want to know, in general I actually enjoyed more “The Dream Machine” than “Dealers of Lightning”, but both are great.)
No need to stop here: if you are interested in learning more about Lick, there is a short biography in chapter seven (titled “The Internet”) of “The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution” by Walter Isaacson.
And tangentially related, even if more appropriate for the Vidéothèque section of this magazine, yet also distributed by Stripe Press, you might want to watch “We Are As Gods”, a documentary about a certain Stewart Brand… another person who, in between LSD trips, transcribed his premonitory dreams in the “Whole Earth Catalog” for a whole generation to get inspiration from.
Bob Taylor (1932-2017) said about Lick:
Most of the significant advances in computer technology—including the work that my group did at Xerox PARC—were simply extrapolations of Lick’s vision. They were not really new visions of their own. So he was really the father of it all.
Waldrop quotes another Bob in page 252: Robert Fano (1917-2016) praising Lick in his own words:
Second, says Fano, when Lick was presented with a miraculous, never-to-be-repeated opportunity to turn his vision into reality, he had the guts to go for it, and the skills to make it work. Lick had the power to spin his dreams so persuasively that Jack Ruina and company were willing to go along with him–and to trust him with the Pentagon’s money. Once he had that money in hand, moreover, Lick had the taste to recognize and cultivate good ideas wherever he found them. Indeed, the ideas he fostered in 1962 would ultimately lay the foundations for computing as we know it today.
Maybe premonitory dreams are a thing, after all. It certainly is comforting to think that we can dream a better future for all of us, involving computers or not, and then make it a reality–if we have the guts… and the cash, that is. Think about the possibilities.
(Or, to put it differently: imagine the negative impact DOGE will have in the US economy during the next 50 years. You have been warned.)
Let us finish this article with some of Waldrop’s own closing words:
Technology isn’t destiny, no matter how inexorable its evolution may seem; the way its capabilities are used is as much a matter of cultural choice and historical accident as politics is, or fashion.
Cover photo by the author.