Book Review: The Dream Machine
The Dream Machine narrates the creation of personal computers and the Internet from World War II until the early 90’s. It follows the life of JCR Licklider (Lick as he liked to be called) and the other inventors, scientists, engineers, and visionaries that created modern computing. There’s an emphasis on two important organizations: ARPA and PARC. These environments fostered many innovations that led to the modern personal computers and Internet. The story focuses primarily on Licklider, ARPA’s first director. During his tenure he fostered a visionary culture of risk taking and bold experiments. He was initially a psychology scholar, and foresaw that computing would have important social and intellectual ramifications. He had a prescient vision of the future and was all about the human-computer symbiosis.
The book makes it clear that modern personal computing wasn’t inevitable. In the early days of mainframes, compute time was an expensive commodity, and these hulking machines were supposed to be used efficiently. Back then human time was less valuable than the mainframe’s time. Developers wrote programs on punch cards, then handed over the deck of cards to the whitecoats that would run the program on the mainframe. It took hours or days to get the result back in the form of a long listing. If there was an unforeseen problem or a bug, too bad, you should have been more careful. Before 1960 it was far from obvious that a single person should have their own computer to interactively experiment and learn.
Lick wanted to have fun with computers. This was a heretical concept during the computing genesis—computers were serious business for serious people. Lick understood that real-time interactions with computers would expand what the human mind is capable of.
What struck me was how loose and light-touch the bureaucracy of ARPA and PARC was. Ambitious projects didn’t need endless reports, extensive studies, countless meetings, or layers of approval. Large chunks of time and money were assigned to bold moonshots after a single meeting or presentation. The US government and Xerox leadership didn’t interfere much with ARPA and PARC during their early years. This gave rise to a frantic culture of innovation, and ambitious experiments.
In contrast to these dynamic labs, universities didn’t come across as cradles of creativity. Harvard University in particular looked like a place where nothing creative gets accomplished; it came off as a conservative institution set on preserving the status quo. Even MIT was a bit of a mixed bag.
The book includes the story of “The Mother of All Demos”. On December 9, 1968, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco’s Brooks Hall, computer visionary Douglas Engelbart delivered what became known as the “Mother of All Demos.” It introduced dynamic windows, hypertext and linking, real-time collaboration, the mouse, chorded keyboard shortcuts, and more. It showed for the first time how computers could expand human intellect. This presentation was a bold gamble as there were multiple things that could have caused the demo to fail.
I found the story of Licklider’s retirement party particularly moving. 300 of Lick’s former colleagues and students were present, and most of them weren’t aware of how influential he was. Lick was such a humble man that people hardly knew about his career and accomplishments. For many he was influential in their personal lives and careers, but they didn’t know how far-reaching his vision was, and how big of a deal he was to modern computing.
The Dream Machine got me excited about technology and computing like I haven’t been in a long time. It’s impressive how far we’ve come over the past 50 years. This progress took hard work, boldness and dedication from countless outstanding minds to get where we are today. Today everybody has a supercomputer in their pocket and we can access most of the world’s knowledge in seconds. These developments were unthinkable after World War II when innovation accelerated. The odds weren’t in favour of the human-computer symbiosis, the powers that be weren’t interested in advancing computing technology except the Department of Defense. The light-touch bureaucracy of ARPA’s early days contrasts with the process- and review-heavy nature of today’s bureaucracies.
The Dream Machine made me appreciate modern computing even more. I feel grateful for these magical devices that extend our minds. We are extremely fortunate to be the recipients of this modern miracle. If you love technology, I highly recommend this book.