tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post4586508642997101994..comments2023-11-22T01:14:54.298-08:00Comments on amor mundi: The Long Tail Tall TaleDale Carricohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-44412548867025859152014-07-21T08:34:01.232-07:002014-07-21T08:34:01.232-07:00[p. 420:]
So there it was: even Lick had to admit...[p. 420:]<br /><br />So there it was: even Lick had to admit that the situation at<br />ARPA had improved significantly since his day. But for how<br />long? . . . [I]n the current climate of budgetary and<br />"relevance" constraints [i.e., relevance to military applications],<br />who knew what the **next** director might be like?<br /><br />Nonetheless, Lick wrote in his "Multinet" article, he was still<br />an optimist. Even if you couldn't automatically look to the private<br />sector or to the government for leadership, you still had -- well,<br />the People. At least when it came to computing, he wrote,<br />"there is a feeling of renewed hope in the air that the public<br />interest will find a way of dominating the decision processes<br />that shape the future."<br /><br />Just look at E-mail, the Arpanet mailing lists, and all the rest,<br />he said. Just look at the on-line communities that seemed to<br />come into being wherever there was a network. Users of a modern<br />computing system weren't just passive consumers; the medium<br />itself drew them in. It gave them a forum, it made them active<br />participants, it gave them a stake in deciding their own destiny.<br />So if you could somehow expose ordinary people to this medium --<br />if you could somehow get the technology out of the laboratory<br />and into the mass market so they could experience it firsthand --<br />then ordinary people might just create this embodiment of<br />equality, community, and freedom on their own.<br /><br />It was a vision downright Jeffersonian in its idealism, and perhaps<br />in its naïveté as well. Nonetheless, Lick insisted, "the renewed<br />hope I referred to is more than just a feeling in the air. . . .It<br />is a feeling one experiences at the console. The information<br />revolution is bringing with it a key that may open the door to a<br />new era of involvement and participation. The key is the self-motivating<br />exhilaration that accompanies truly effective interaction with<br />information and knowledge through a good console connected through<br />a good network to a good computer."<br />====<br /><br /><br />OLIVERs, huh? Now I have Eva Gabor and Eddie Albert running<br />through my head. ;-><br />jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-65713169518896884682014-07-21T08:33:36.419-07:002014-07-21T08:33:36.419-07:00From _The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and th...From _The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution<br />That Made Computing Personal_ (M. Mitchell Waldrop, 2001),<br />Chapter 9 "Lick's Kids", pp. 413 ff.<br /><br />---------------------<br />Let's be optimists, [Licklider] wrote in 1979, on one of those<br />rare occasions when he committed such a scenario to paper.*<br />[* The occasion was a series of essays on the future of computing,<br />collected by Mike Dertouzos and his deputy Joel Moses and<br />published as _The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View_. Lick's<br />forty-page chapter, entitled "Computers and Government,"<br />was one of the longest in the book. In addition to his<br />fantasy about the Multinet/Internet, it included a very<br />thorough overview of the policy issues raised by information<br />technology -- an analysis that stands up pretty well<br />today (2001). . .]. Let's assume that Moore's Law will<br />continue to work its magic as it has in the past, and now let's<br />imagine ourselves in the year 2000: "Waveguides, optical fibers,<br />rooftop satellite antennae, and coaxial cables provide<br />abundant bandwidth and inexpensive digital transmission<br />both locally and over long distances. Computer consoles with<br />good graphic display and speech input and output have become<br />almost as common as television sets."<br /><br />Great. But what would all those gadgets add up to, Lick wondered,<br />other than a bigger pile of gadgets? Well, he said, if we<br />continue to be optimists and assumed that all this technology<br />was connected so that the bits flowed freely, then it might<br />actually add up to an electronic **commons** open to all, as<br />"the main and essential medium of informational interaction for<br />governments, institutions, corporations, and individuals." Indeed,<br />he went on, looking back from the imagined viewpoint of the<br />year 2000, "[the electronic commons] has supplanted the postal<br />system for letters, the dial-tone phone system for conversations<br />and teleconferences, stand-alone batch-processing and time-sharing<br />systems for computation, and most filing cabinets, microfilm<br />repositories, document rooms and libraries for information<br />storage and retrieval."<br /><br />This vision of the "Multinet," as Lick called it -- the term "Internet"<br />didn't really exist yet -- was his synthesis of all the thinking<br />and talking and writing that had gone on about the on-line world<br />within the ARPA community since his "Symbiosis" paper in 1960.<br />The Multinet would permeate society, Lick wrote, thus achieving<br />the old MIT dream of an information utility, as updated for the<br />decentralized network age: "Many people work at home, interacting<br />with coworkers and clients through the Multinet, and many<br />business offices (and some classrooms) are little more than<br />organized interconnections of such home workers and their computers.<br />People shop throught the Multinet, using its cable television and<br />electronic funds transfer functions, and a few receive delivery<br />of small items through adjacent pneumatic tube networks. . . .Routine<br />shopping and appointment scheduling are generally handled by<br />private-secretary-like programs called OLIVERs which know their<br />masters' needs. Indeed, the Multinet handles scheduling of<br />almost everything schedulable. For example, it eliminates waiting<br />to be seated at restaurants." Thanks to ironclad guarantees of<br />privacy and security, Lick added, the Multinet would likewise<br />offer on-line banking, on-line stock-market trading, on-line<br />tax payment -- the works. . .jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.com