Name: The Dream Machine
ISBN: 9780142001356

The Dream Machine

"The year is 1962. More than a decade will pass before personal computers emerge from the garages of Silicon Valley, and a full thirty years before the Internet explosion of the 1990s. The word computer still has an ominous tone, conjuring up the image of a huge, intimidating device hidden away in an overlit, air-conditioned basement, relentlessly processing punch cards for some large institution: them. Yet, sitting in a nondescript office in Robert McNamara's Pentagon, a quiet forty-seven-year-old civilian is already planning the revolution that will change forever the way computers are perceived. Somehow, the occupant of that office - a former MIT psychologist named J.C.R. Licklider - has seen a future in which computers will empower individuals, instead of forcing them into rigid conformity. He is almost alone in his conviction that computers can become not just superfast calculating machines but joyful machines: tools that will serve as new media of expression, inspirations to creativity, and gateways to a vast world of on line information. And now he is determined to use the Pentagon's money to make that vision a reality."--BOOK JACKET. -- Interview.

What Hacker News says

andyjohnson0Jul 2026

The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop

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olooneyJul 2026

A brief chronology of the extended mind thesis:

* Characteristica universalis, Leibniz (c. 1679) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis

* As We May Think, Vannevar Bush (1945) - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

* Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Norbert Wiener (1948) - https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph-pdf/2254528/book_9...

* An Introduction to Cybernetics, Ashby (1956) - https://ashby.info/Ashby-Introduction-to-Cybernetics.pdf

* Man-Computer Symbiosis, J. C. R. Licklider, (1960) - https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html

* Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, by Douglas Engelbart (1962) - https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html

* Man and the Computer, John G. Kemeny - https://archive.org/details/mancomputerbyjoh0000john

* The Extended Mind Thesis, Andy Clark and David Chalmers (1998) - https://www.alice.id.tue.nl/references/clark-chalmers-1998.p...

* The Dream Machine (2002) - https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-M-Mitchell-Waldrop/dp/1...

See also the Wikipedia article on "Intelligence Amplification", which gives a subset of the above list but also provides a great deal of context.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_amplification

I have these notes to hand because I've written about it in the context of the deep history of computer science:

https://www.oranlooney.com/post/history-of-computing-2/#appe...

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jauntywundrkindJun 2026

If you haven't read Waldrop's The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (2002), run don't walk to your nearest bookstore or library & get a copy. Amazing tale of an incredible creation of computing and connection.

It's so fantastic, such a surprise to see this age now where it no longer takes decades of training to become able to really enter a symbiosis with computers. There's plenty of things not great about LLMs and their behaviors, but there's also so much one can learn with curiosity and their native written language now, that used to all require so much more esoteric knowledge to begin to understand. It's incredible. "The Language Problem" is radically diminished:

> The basic dissimilarity between human languages and computer languages may be the most serious obstacle to true symbiosis.

I loved this quote from Jesse Kriss, as described by Chris Ashworth as he talked about writing some new theater software with LLMs, https://www.tiktok.com/@chris_ashworth/video/760080103729276...

> The interesting thing about this is that it's not taking away something that was human and making it a robot. We've been forced to talk to computers in computer language. And this is turning that around.

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ScarblacDec 2025

I was suffering from a burnout for much of the year and read mostly to relax. Reread a bunch of Discworld and read most of the Expanse series for the first time. Some Murakami. The Conway biography ("Genius At Play"), also a reread because it's fun.

But "The Dream Machine: JCR Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal", often recommended om HN, was amazing. It has so much of the history of how personal computers came to be, and so much that was new to me.

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fragmedeNov 2025

That's certainly one opinion, and is even right, to some degree. But there's also movies like the Imitation Game about Alan Turing, which is a movie, and not a documentary, but there are also countless documentaries about him. There's no shortage of hagiographies about Steven Jobs, in both book and film and tv miniseries format, along with Pirates of Silicon Valley which includes Microsoft's part. There's a movie about Aaron Swartz (The Internet’s Own Boy). The movie Antitrust(2001) is fictional, but in the same area.

Hackers (1995) is fictional but a cult classic. Freedom Downtime (2001) is about Mitnick and hacking culture. There's smaller documentaries too. There's that one about Wikileaks, that one about Cambridge Analytica. There's books like The Dream Machine (Mitchell), Unix: A History and a Memoir (Brian W. Kernighan), The UNIX‑HATERS Handbook (Simson Garfinkel et al.). There's http://folklore.org about the early days at Apple. Asiometry has https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffh3DRFzRL0, a 20 minute bit about the Unix wars.

The source code to the original Microsoft DOS is at https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS. The Anarchist Cookbook is on Kindle, https://www.2600.com/Magazine/digital-back-issues goes back to 2010.

DefCON got too big for the Riv and the Sahara, and is now at the LVCC. Yeah it's not the same. It's never going to be the same, but some still gather for their yearly mecca and watch Hackers and get drunk in hotel suites paid for by corporate sponsors. Others stay home for various reasons.

Do we still keep what we're doing? I mean, I don't program in Z80 ASM assembly anymore. There are still classes in my code by the focus on OOP isn't what it once was. I'm not sure if I want to call it progress, but I don't program Win32 applications anymore. I can spin up a web app with an LLM in an afternoon, and have it web-scale to the whole world in less time than it used to take to get a computer racked in a colo.

It's not 1979, the cable I use to go from USB-C to HDMI is more powerful than the computer that took us to space. By like, a million times.

Look, I'm not saying we shouldn't respect our elders. By this point, though my beard's not yet grey, relatively speaking I am an elder. I learned to program from paper books. Before ChatGPT, before Stack Overflow, before Google. There are some here that predate me by decades. If you're competing with a $10 million Oracle db system, and going from 6 ASM instructions to 5 in the inner loop will eke out that extra percent of performance, and win you the contract, by all means, sit down, roll up your sleeves, and hand optimize assembly in order to figure out how to get rid of that one instruction.

The joke is oft made, that other fields stand on the shoulder of giants, while in computer science, we stand on their toes. And it's not wrong. I can't wait to for the next new language to pop up and reimplement a DAG solver for their package management woes, and to invent a better sandbox for running untrusted code. That's still an unsolved problem. If this stuff interests you, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California is worth the visit. The only problem is that at the end of the tour is computers I grew up with, which has a certain way of making a fella feel old.

The travesty that is happening right now, is in the wake of Paul Allen's death, is the debache with his surviving sister and the Seattle Living Computer Museum.

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ashwinsundarJul 2025

I always wondered why Stripe Press was a thing. Why was a financial services company publishing books about the lives of great engineers? I'm very happy you did though, the books themselves are a great read, not to mention they are very beautiful. I really liked "The Dream Machine" in particular

Why did you want to start Stripe Press in the first place? How did you get the support to do it?

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