Whether it was Timothy Leary’s lectures on the benefits of psychedelic drugs or newfound interest in Eastern mysticism, even the Pentagon was not impervious to the cultural anarchy of the late 1960s. Unconstrained by conventional wisdom but bound by a belief in rigorous science, ARPA was about to create a new field of research, transforming J. C. R. Licklider’s notion of man-computer symbiosis into technology that would allow people to control computers with nothing more than their thoughts.
