![]() ![]() And this interaction found its fullest expression in Arpanet-that “intergalactic network” that became the network of networks, the Internet-funded by the Pentagon but then exploding beyond its military confinement. Skating his way through so much of this history was Licklider, a psychologist with a bent for mechanical engineering and mathematics, who saw the computer as humane and intimate, as a democratizing tool, but most of all a dreamer who understood that the beauty of the machine lay not in “automating those huge data-processing engines called bureaucracies.” Rather, its glory would be in human-computer symbiosis, wedding the computer’s algorithmic talents with the human’s intuitive ones. In what amounts to a history of the computer, Waldrop introduces readers to the men and women involved in the process (from Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann to Gary Kildall) and the process itself (decimal to binary and mechanical to electronic and operator to programmer). Licklider, the man who put “personal” in “personal computers,” in this lively, memorable, and wickedly detailed biography from Waldrop ( Creativity, not reviewed). ![]()
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