Tuesday  April 15, 2003

Dear Ray:

I have finally returned from a week in Florida, looking at some medical problems at the
Jackson Hospital down there and am now ready to give you my story of Licklider and BBN.
Here goes, and I hope you will be able to make some sense of it. The story of BBN and my
association with it really starts in 1945. At that time I had been in Harvard for one
year and was in the Psychology Dep't.  One of the people there was J.C.R. Licklider  who
was also associated with the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory and sporadically with MIT.  I
took a graduate course in Mathematical Statistics taught by Lick.  It originally had been
scheduled to be a course in Statistics but he didn't really know any statistics of the
cookbook kind and instead taught us Mathematical Statistics.  This provided me with a
foundation that has withstood the test of time and has made me superficially competent in
any kind of statistics. The class was a graduate class even though I was an undergraduate
but he generously allowed me to go in and it had a most interesting collection of
graduate students - George Miller, Leo Postman, Ward Edwards, Virginia Loftus (my wife)
and myself, plus of course 2 or 3 more whose names have slipped from memory.  In any
event I did well in the class and Lick and I became good friends.    I graduated in 1948
and in 1950 Ginny and I moved to Yellow Springs, Ohio.  She became immediately involved
with the Aeromedical Laboratory Psychology Dept. as did I, by association, and skipping
over all the inbetween bits I eventually ended up working there.

Occasionally Licklider's name would surface.  He was involved in a great many things
connected with the military research establishment and I would occasionally meet him at
APA meetings.  I went from the Aeromedical Laboratory to the Arctic Aeromedical
Laboratory at Fairbanks, Alaska in 1956 and then from there to Minneapolis, Honeywell in
1957 to set up a Human Factors Group at Honeywell.  I continued to run into Licklider at
meetings so that we maintained some correspondence and had occasional conversation.  Then
in 1962 I had become utterly bored with Honeywell and devised for myself what I termed an
"industrial sabbatical."  I joined Bob Gottsdanker at Santa Barbara and had a wonderful
time. While I was there, Licklider telephoned from Los Angeles and said that he would
like to talk with me, and could he come up?   I accepted that proposal with pleasure  He
came and talked and made a really good invitation to BBN. He told me about all the
marvelous projects that they were working on there and told me more particularly that it
was general policy that new people set up their own programs;  a department would be
established for them; and they would run the department; and then if they left, why, the
department very likely would be folded up.  That sounded like the kind of place I wanted
to be and gave Honeywell one year's notice before leaving them in the lurch because we
had a great set of projects there, most of which I had brought in and I couldn't let
these drop without notice.

Lick told me that the single operating rule of BBN was that if you met someone as smart
as yourself you hired him/her.  I was suitably flattered and used the same rule from time
to time in succeeding years. I recall making a forceful but unsuccessful effort to get
Donald Broadbent to join us.  Unfortunately Oxford had too strong a pull. But I did get
Nickerson immediately after hearing his performance at the first meeting on Sensation and
Performance at Soesterberg.

I left Honeywell and arrived at BBN in 1963.  Licklider greeted me with the announcement
that here was my office, here was my secretary, all I had to do was get to work and would
I mind, please, helping him on a project that seemed to have stalled.  I asked "What's
the project?" and he said it was the 'Library of the 21st Century'.  This meant
absolutely nothing to me.  I had not been a computer jock.  I knew analog computers but I
had managed to resist the digital computer, for no reason except sheer stubbornness.  So
I was introduced into the Library of the 21st Century and Licklider told me the sad tale
of his having promised to deliver an estimate of the digital storage requirements for the
contents of all the world's libraries and that 3 people had tried to do it and that none
of them had succeeded and they had quit on him and gone elsewhere, unable to figure out
what to do, and would I do that.  So I thought about it for about 5 seconds and said
"Sure.  I can do that." (I did and published it ahead of schedule)

Lick's office was interesting.  There was a set of lights on the outside wall near the
door this was called the "Lick-lighter" and a green light meant he could be disturbed; a
red light meant that he would prefer not to be, although in general I must say that he
was accessible if one really needed him.

He worked on so many simultaneous projects that he had devised the scheme of having a
large number of strong clipboards, each one devoted to a project.  These would hang on a
strip of wood with nails along one side of the room so that the 15 or 20 things he was
simultaneously working on were all visually available to him and he had merely to hang up
what he was doing and take the clipboard he wanted, and there would be everything he
needed.  Of course, in those days things were not on a computer.  Everything was on paper
and sometimes it got to be pretty thick.  But mostly, the mere fact that it was on paper
made it easy to know where things were and what was to be done with them.

And one of Lick's major concerns was that he said he was getting a reputation being late
on all his contracts and grants (we all were I am sure) and people were beginning to
complain that all you got from BBN was a "lick and a promise"   Meanwhile I found myself
launched into electronic storage and publication as a new speciality, which I didn't
particularly want but I was stuck with it.   Suddenly, as the Library project neared
completion, Lick announced that he was moving to ARPA (now DARPA) for some unstated
purpose and forthwith left.  And this was only about 3 months after I got there so one of
the principal reasons for my moving to BBN had suddenly disappeared and I was left
holding my own bag, which I enjoyed very much but I was a bit shocked by the fact that my
one-time instructor/mentor (he did direct my undergraduate honours) and friend, had
suddenly abandoned me at BBN and gone to Washington.  However, of course, what he did at
ARPA was tremendously important and we continued to correspond but, since I wasn't as
digitally oriented as he was, I really didn't understand a great deal of what he was
doing.   I remember traveling to Washington once with him. We sat side by side in the
airplane and he was busy scribbling on a pad all the way.  I asked what he was up to and
was told he was writing sub-routines for some quite sophisticated computer program -
probably on the IBM-704.

Despite the relatively primitive equipment that we had that Lick was working on, the
things that were done have yet to appear in modern word processing and data handling
systems. We had a 50 megabytes drum memory about the size of a  40-gal oil drum and was a
staggering amount of memory for that time. We were able to store 3 full text documents,
complete with line graphics, and the programs that Lick was writing to make it possible
to merge the data on the 3 documents in a variety of formats with  automatic adjustment
of scales and data so that all the data were combined into a single figure and a single
table.

Many years later Ann and I were driving through Cambridge, in the late '90's.  I suddenly
felt that I should call Lick.  I knew that he lived not very far from where I was at that
moment, so I telephoned and found, to my delight, that I had caught him on his birthday,
and, to my distress, that he was very ill.  We spoke briefly and had a few minutes of
remembering old things which brought us both a great deal of pleasure.  I wish that I had
called 10 years earlier and renewed our friendship at a time when he was in better
health.  Not too long after that he died.

I attended the memorial meeting at MIT and spoke briefly to Louise. Lick had played 3
significant roles in my life:  tutor, thesis advisor and very good friend.  I listened to
what other people had to say about their own experiences with Lick and enjoyed their
reminiscences as much as my own.