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A comment on Man-Computer Symbiosis by J. C. R. Licklider (1960). Parent comment

Re:Man-Computer Symbiosis by J. C. R. Licklider (1960) by metroholografix on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @02:30PM (#40868743)
Wizards for me falls flat (kinda like "soul of a new machine" that's often recommended but which I found a complete waste of time) while the Dream Machine, Dealers of Lightning [1] and Norbert Wiener's biography [2] are all essential reading.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Hero-Information-Age-Cybernetics...

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Re:Man-Computer Symbiosis by J. C. R. Licklider (1960) by boguscoder on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @03:52PM (#40869430)
Id also add The Idea Factory* unless you have even better recommendations for Bell Labs era

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11797471-the-idea-factor...

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Re:Man-Computer Symbiosis by J. C. R. Licklider (1960) by tedunangst on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @05:36PM (#40870221)
Showstopper, about windows NT, is a good replacement for Soul.
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Re:Man-Computer Symbiosis by J. C. R. Licklider (1960) by uolmir on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @09:47PM (#40871690)
Yeah. I think if I read Dream Machine first I would have enjoyed Wizards less. But some of the history was new to me which meant that I enjoyed Wizards for those aspects and then Dream Machine for the detailed look into why it happened.
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Re:Man-Computer Symbiosis by J. C. R. Licklider (1960) by djmips on Friday July 05, 2024 @02:37PM (#40884996)
"The Soul of a New Machine" is not so much a foundational book but a snapshot of the computer industry and might be more interesting to someone who had no idea of the industry as I did when it was published in 1981. For me it was a fascinating glimpse into the tech industry that I would soon join, albeit in software not hardware.
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