How the World Got Wired · Licklider’s Dream

What Lick Built, and What He Didn’t

Here is the part of the story that surprises a lot of people. Lick did not build the internet. He didn’t even build the small version of it that came first, which was called the ARPANET.

He stayed at ARPA for less than two years. In 1964, he went back to academia. He had set up the office, hired some early staff, written some memos, and convinced everyone he worked with that connecting computers was important. Then he handed the keys to someone else and left.

The person who took over after Lick was named Ivan Sutherland, and after him a man named Bob Taylor, and after Taylor a man named Larry Roberts. Taylor was the one who, in 1966, walked into the office of his boss at ARPA and said something like: We need to build a network. His boss asked how much it would cost. Taylor said about a million dollars. His boss said yes. The whole meeting, according to Taylor’s memory, took about twenty minutes.

Roberts was the one who actually built the thing. Three years later, in October of 1969, the first message would be sent on the network Roberts built. You’ll hear about that in Chapter 4.

But none of it would have happened the way it did without Lick. He was the person who first said, clearly and in writing, that computers were not just calculators — they were a new kind of medium for human thought. He was the person who first said that the right way to use a computer was to talk to it, in real time, the way you talk to a friend. He was the person who first imagined a network of them, stretching across the world, sharing what they knew.

A lot of important things in the world are built like this. One person has a vision and writes it down. Another person reads what was written and builds part of it. A third person builds another part. A fourth person turns the whole thing into something the rest of us can use. By the time you and I see the result — a phone in your hand, a video from your grandmother — the original person is often long gone, and most people have no idea their name was ever attached to it.

J.C.R. Licklider died on June 26, 1990. The very same year, in a physics laboratory in Switzerland, a young British scientist who had read Lick’s papers as a graduate student turned on the first web server in history. The thing most of us mean when we say “the internet” — the world wide web — was being born in that laboratory while Lick was dying.

He never saw it.

His memos sit in archives now. You can read them online, if you want, on the internet that he imagined before there was an internet to imagine it on.

The next part of the story is about how packets — those numbered little pieces of grandma’s video, in the prologue — were actually invented. The idea did not come from MIT, or from ARPA, or from any university computer lab. It came from a man at a research company in California, whose real worry was not science.

His real worry was nuclear war.

That’s Chapter 3.

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