The Dream Machine
The genealogy of interactive computing — Licklider, ARPA, and the dream of augmenting human thought.
Waldrop traces how a single vision — computers as partners that augment human thinking — moved from one man’s head, J.C.R. Licklider, through ARPA into networks, personal computing, and the interfaces we now take for granted. It is one of the cleanest bridges between AI, infrastructure, and institutional imagination: capability arrives because someone funds and organizes a dream long before the market believes it.