ABSTRACT
This paper explores an early attempt by Cambridge-based consultants Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. to set up a system based on tightly coupled interactions between human beings and digital, electronic, stored-program computers. BB&N conceived the project around 1960 as a first chance to instantiate J. C. R. Licklider’s vision of man-computer symbiosis. BB&N collaborated with the National Institutes of Health, the Massachusetts General Hospital, and the American Hospital Association on this “total information system,” known as the Hospital Computer Project. Since the project was widely considered a failure when it concluded in 1968, it perhaps counts as the first inkling that man-machine symbiosis was fatally unstable.
