Sputnik's beep frightened Congress into creating ARPA. Thomas Watson Jr. then bet two years of IBM's revenue on System/360, the high church of the punch card and the operator's window. On the day he announced it, a psychologist named J.C.R. Licklider sat in the Pentagon handing out research money on handshakes. Lick had timed his own working day and found that most of his thinking time went on clerical work. His answer was a partnership of person and machine, and a joke memo about an Intergalactic Computer Network.
This chapter has not been serialised yet. It will appear on Substack first, and this page will carry its opening when it does.
- In this chapter
- J.C.R. Licklider, Thomas Watson Jr., Vincent Learson, Gene Amdahl, Fred Brooks, Bob Taylor, Charles Herzfeld, Robert Fano
- The idea it builds
- Batch processing at the operator's window against time-sharing at a keyboard, and why one instruction set across a whole product line mattered.