The Dream Machine Quotes

“> In effect, though Wiener didn't quite express it this way, cybernetics was offering an alternative to the Skinnerian worldview, in which human beings were just stimulus-response machines to be manipulated and conditioned for their own good. It was likewise offering an alternative to von Neumann's worldview, wherein human beings were unrealistically rational technocrats capable of anticipating, controlling, and managing their society with perfect confidence. Instead, cybernetics held out a vision of humans as neither gods nor clay but rather "machines" of the new kind, embodying purpose—and thus, autonomy. No, we were not the absolute masters of our universe; we lived in a world that was complex, confusing, and largely uncontrollable. But neither were we helpless. We were embedded in our world, in constant communication with our environment and one another. We had the power to act, to observe, to learn from our mistakes, and to grow. "From the point of view of cybernetics, the world is an organism," Wiener declared in his autobiography. "In such a world, knowledge is in its essence the process of knowing. . . . Knowledge is an aspect of life which must be interpreted while we are living, if it is to be interpreted at all. Life is the continual interplay between the individual and his environment rather than a way of existing under the form of eternity.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal

“As a thought experiment, von Neumann's analysis was simplicity itself. He was saying that the genetic material of any self-reproducing system, whether natural or artificial, must function very much like a stored program in a computer: on the one hand, it had to serve as live, executable machine code, a kind of algorithm that could be carried out to guide the construction of the system's offspring; on the other hand, it had to serve as passive data, a description that could be duplicated and passed along to the offspring.

As a scientific prediction, that same analysis was breathtaking: in 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick finally determined the molecular structure of DNA, it would fulfill von Neumann's two requirements exactly. As a genetic program, DNA encodes the instructions for making all the enzymes and structural proteins that the cell needs in order to function. And as a repository of genetic data, the DNA double helix unwinds and makes a copy of itself every time the cell divides in two. Nature thus built the dual role of the genetic material into the structure of the DNA molecule itself.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal

“Instead of storing those countless microfilmed pages alphabetically, or according to subject, or by any of the other indexing methods in common use—all of which he found hopelessly rigid and arbitrary—Bush proposed a system based on the structure of thought itself. "The human mind . . . operates by association," he noted. "With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. . . . The speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures [are] awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature." By analogy, he continued, the desk library would allow its user to forge a link between any two items that seemed to have an association (the example he used was an article on the English long bow, which would be linked to a separate article on the Turkish short bow; the actual mechanism of the link would be a symbolic code imprinted on the microfilm next to the two items). "Thereafter," wrote Bush, "when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button. . . . It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails."

Such a device needed a name, added Bush, and the analogy to human memory suggested one: "Memex." This name also appeared for the first time in the 1939 draft.

In any case, Bush continued, once a Memex user had created an associative trail, he or she could copy it and exchange it with others. This meant that the construction of trails would quickly become a community endeavor, which would over time produce a vast, ever-expanding, and ever more richly cross-linked web of all human knowledge.

Bush never explained where this notion of associative trails had come from (if he even knew; sometimes things just pop into our heads). But there is no doubt that it ranks as the Yankee Inventor's most profoundly original idea. Today we know it as hypertext. And that vast, hyperlinked web of knowledge is called the World Wide Web.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal

“Through feedback, said Wiener, Bigelow, and Rosenblueth, a mechanism could embody purpose.

Even today, more than half a century later, that assertion still has the power to fascinate and disturb. It arguably marks the beginning of what are now known as artificial intelligence and cognitive science: the study of mind and brain as information processors. But more than that, it does indeed claim to bridge that ancient gulf between body and mind—between ordinary, passive matter and active, purposeful spirit. Consider that humble thermostat again. It definitely embodies a purpose: to keep the room at a constant temperature. And yet there is nothing you can point to and say, "Here it is—this is the psychological state called purpose." Rather, purpose in the thermostat is a property of the system as a whole and how its components are organized. It is a mental state that is invisible and ineffable, yet a natural phenomenon that is perfectly comprehensible.

And so it is in the mind, Wiener and his colleagues contended. Obviously, the myriad feedback mechanisms that govern the brain are far more complex than any thermostat. But at base, their operation is the same. If we can understand how ordinary matter in the form of a machine can embody purpose, then we can also begin to understand how those three pounds of ordinary matter inside our skulls can embody purpose—and spirit, and will, and volition. Conversely, if we can see living organisms as (enormously complex) feedback systems actively interacting with their environments, then we can begin to comprehend how the ineffable qualities of mind are not separate from the body but rather inextricably bound up in it.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal

“Nonetheless, his vision of high technology’s enhancing and empowering the individual, as opposed to serving some large institution, was quite radical for 1939—so radical, in fact, that it wouldn’t really take hold of the public’s imagination for another forty years, at which point it would reemerge as the central message of the personal-computer revolution.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Lick was unique in bringing to the field a deep appreciation for human beings: our capacity to perceive, to adapt, to make choices, and to devise completely new ways of tackling apparently intractable problems. As an experimental psychologist, he found these abilities every bit as subtle and as worthy of respect as a computer’s ability to execute an algorithm. And that was why to him, the real challenge would always lie in adapting computers to the humans who used them, thereby exploiting the strengths of each.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“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.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“There was this thread of ideas that led from Vannevar Bush through J. C. R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Alan Kay”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“computer science is the study of “the phenomena surrounding computers”—all the phenomena,”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Under this scenario, in sum, we would collectively stumble our way toward a fragmented, parochial, Big Brotherish kind of information system “characterized by supervision, regulation, constraint, and control.” Moreover, given his view of the world in 1979, Lick had to rate this possibility as far more likely than his optimistic projection. An integrated, open, universally accessible Multinet wouldn’t just happen on its own, he pointed out. It would require cooperation and effort on a time scale of decades, “a long, hard process of deliberate study, experiment, analysis, and development.” That process, in turn, could be sustained only by the forging of a collective vision, some rough consensus on the part of thousands or maybe even millions of people that an open electronic commons was worth having. And that, wrote Lick, would require leadership.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“women’s work (the word computer was still a job description in the 1920s, carrying much the same pink-collar connotation as typist).”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“the code had to be written in a “hexadecimal” notation, in which the numbers 10 through 15 were abbreviated by the letters F, G, J, K, Q,”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Unlike Davies, he didn't have to work through the British Postal Service. And unlike Baran, he didn't have to work through the Defense Communications Agency. Roberts was backed by ARPA, whose whole reason for existing was to cut through the bureaucracy. His bosses were giving him a free hand. And he meant to exercise that freedom. He meant to get this network ready to”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal

“had found a decent name for the thing—a process that had proved to be surprisingly tricky.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Berners-Lee’s hypertext browsing, users would finally begin to get it about the Internet.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“By 1990 the Arpanet was history.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“the Kahn-Cerf internetworking protocols had become the official standard of the Defense Department in 1980, and the Arpanet itself had switched over to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983—an event that many would call the actual birth of the Internet.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Jobs and his top engineers finally showed up for an afternoon visit in December 1979, the presentation was as minimal as Goldberg could make it.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“a new open-interface standard that would allow hardware and software to evolve independently.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“MS-DOS—that was just barely different enough from CP/M to avoid legal action.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“collect all the code that had to be customized for each new computer or disk drive and put it into a small Unix-like kernel that he called the Basic Input/Output System, or BIOS.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“CP/M—for Control Program for Microcomputers—it had been created by thirty-three-year-old Gary Kildall, a computer-science teacher at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“the Apple Computer Company, founded in 1976 by Homebrew Computer Club members Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, longtime buddies from the Silicon Valley town of Cupertino.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“MITS and the Altair had vanished by 1979. If Roberts and his computer were gone, however, the movement they had done so much to create was already self-sustaining. Not only were new brands of machines flooding the market by the dozens, if not by the hundreds, there were also users’ groups for every microcomputer imaginable, as well as pan-micro groups such as the legendary Homebrew Computer Club, which held its first meeting in a Palo Alto garage in March 1975. There were magazines such as Byte, which debuted in August 1975, and the software periodical Dr. Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia (motto: “Running Light without Overbyte”), which published its first issue in 1976. There were specialty stores like the Byte Shop and ComputerLand, the latter soon to be a nationwide chain.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“(The language also owed its existence to the Harvard PDP-10, interestingly enough. Since Gates and Allen didn’t have access to an Intel 8080 at the time, they used Gates’s student account on the big machine to create a simulation of the microprocessor”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“official programming language was reminiscent of the minis. Created in the spring of 1975 by two young men who had been inspired by the Popular Electronics article—Bill Gates, now a Harvard undergrad, and his high school buddy Paul Allen, a programmer working outside Boston—Altair BASIC took a number of key features from DEC’s BASIC for the PDP-11.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“The father of the Altair was H. Edward Roberts of Albuquerque, New Mexico,”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Mark-8, another 8008-based machine, designed in the fall of 1973 by Jonathan Titus,”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Altair was not the first commercial microcomputer; that honor goes to the Micral, an Intel 8008—based machine that was sold in France starting in May 1973.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Intel’s mental model of its product,” according to Ceruzzi, “was this: an industrial customer bought an 8080 and wrote specialized software for it, which was then burned into a read-only memory to give a system with the desired functions. The resulting inexpensive product (no longer programmable) was then put on the market as an embedded controller in an industrial system.”13 (Ceruzzi adds that Intel did build several microcomputers during this period; however, it marketed the ten-thousand-dollar Intellec “Development Systems” not as general-purpose computers but as tools to help customers write and debug software for embedded processors.)”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine