The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal

by M. Mitchell Waldrop

That was probably just as well. However fierce the controversy surrounding its birth, the stored-program concept now ranks as one of the great ideas of the computer age—arguably the great idea. By rendering software completely abstract and decoupling it from the physical hardware, the stored-program concept has had the paradoxical effect of making software into something that is almost physically tangible. Software has become a medium that can be molded, sculpted, and engineered on its own terms. Indeed, as the Yale University computer scientist David Gelernter has pointed out, the modern relationship between software and hardware is essentially the same as that between music and the instrument or voice that brings it to life. A single computer can transform itself into the cockpit of a fighter jet, a budget projection, a chapter of a novel, or whatever else you want, just as a single piano can be used to play Bach or funky blues. Conversely, a spreadsheet file can (with a little effort) be run on a Microsoft Windows machine, a Macintosh, or a Unix workstation, just as a Bach fugue can be performed on a pipe organ or by an ensemble of tubas. The bits and bytes that encode the spreadsheet obviously can't function without the computer, any more than a page full of notes can become music without a performer. And yet the spreadsheet also transcends the computer, in exactly the same way that the Bach fugue transcends any given performance of it. Everything important about that ...