Futurism, Technology
Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, known simply as J. C. R. or “Lick”, was an American psychologist and computer scientist who is considered one of the most important figures in computer science and general computing history.
He is particularly remembered for being one of the first to foresee modern-style interactive computing and its application to all manner of activities; and also as an Internet pioneer with an early vision of a worldwide computer network long before it was built. He did much to actually initiate this by funding research which led to much of it, including today’s canonical graphical user interface, and the ARPANET, the direct predecessor to the Internet.
He has been called “computing’s Johnny Appleseed”, for planting the seeds of computing in the digital age; Robert Taylor, founder of Xerox PARC’s Computer Science Laboratory and Digital Equipment Corporation’s Systems Research Center, noted that “most of the significant advances in computer technology—including the work that my group did at Xerox PARC—were simply extrapolations of Lick’s vision. They were not really new visions of their own. So he was really the father of it all”.
Futurism, Science, Technology
Vannevar Bush was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime military R&D was carried out, including initiation and early administration of the Manhattan Project. He is also known in engineering for his work on analog computers, for founding Raytheon, and for the memex, a hypothetical adjustable microfilm viewer with a structure analogous to that of hypertext. In 1945, Bush published the essay “As We May Think” in which he predicted that “wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified”.[2] The memex influenced generations of computer scientists, who drew inspiration from its vision of the future. He was chiefly responsible for the movement that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation.
Science, Technology
A principal member of the Manhattan Project, and a key figure in the development of game theory and the concepts of cellular automata, the universal constructor and the digital computer.
Science, Technology
A pioneering English computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and theoretical biologist. He was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine.
