IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - September/October 2020 - 51

Column: Bits vs. Electronics

Beyond the Interweb
Bob Frankston

FROM LICKLIDER TO THE INTERNET

& I AM WRITING this after having a webinar with
IEEE CE members and others.
JCR Licklider1 would have been thrilled to see
such a powerful man-machine symbiosis having
become so normal and having it work so well
(see Figure 1). Lick, as he was called, can be considered the grandfather of the Internet. He was
cofounder of MIT's Project MAC. In 1963, he
wrote about an Intergalactic Network2 that
would interconnect the world's computers.
Lick was an acoustic psychologist, neither a
computer scientist nor engineer. His focus was
on how the technology could empower people.
It is telling that I came across his research while
taking a class in psycholinguistics. I read a paper
he wrote when he worked at IBM in 1949 about
what kind of radios worked best in noisy environments. Some radios seemed worse in quiet
environments and were better against a noisy
background.
Another mentor, Seymour Papert, studied
how people learn to learn and form concepts. He
was a student of Jean Piaget who studied the
stages that children went through in conceptualizing the world. Or don't. As Papert pointed out,
people do not learn but societies do by having
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2020.3005110
Date of publication 13 July 2020; date of current version
10 August 2020.

September/October 2020

people who understand the new conceptual
framework come to the fore.
When I first tried to explain the Internet and
Consumer Electronics in my column3 I did not
fully appreciate how my take differed from the
common view even among those well-versed in
the concepts. To me it is obvious that we had
transcended the original design point of a network of networks and that, at least architecturally, we could view it as a flat address space
independent of the accidental topology of the
earlier networks.
I had long viewed networks as simply a
means and not important in and of themselves. I
was first online in 1966 as part of my job-
helping to build an online service for financial
analysts. As with networks, I view programming
as a means of creating an experience. (OK, I also
see it as fun, but I do not forget the larger context). Taking the terminal home that summer
meant I could explore computing rather than
just focus on assigned projects.
This is why I am excited about my latest toy,
sorry, research platform, the BangleJS watch,
which is programmed in JavaScript (see Figure 2).
This makes it easy to create small applications
without worrying about all particulars of the
hardware.
The software happened to run on a particular
device and take advantage of the display, but it
is not embedded. It just happens to be using
the wrist device (ok, watch if you want to use

Published by the IEEE Consumer Technology Society

2162-2248 ß 2020 IEEE

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - September/October 2020

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