[SIGCIS-Members] Query: Dolphins and 1960s Interactive Computing

[Thomas Haigh]

Hello everyone,

Below is a query that John D. Peters, a communications professor at the
University of Iowa has asked me to pass on in case anyone has any knowledge
on this rather specific topic. He is not a SIGCIS member, so please send
responses to him directly at john-peters at uiowua.edu.

HIS QUERY:

>>>> Ted Nelson (whose mother just died), J. C. R. Licklider, Douglas
Englebart, and John Lilly were all funded by the info sciences division of
the USAF in the 1960s under Harold Wooster.  There is a pervasive metaphor
in cetacean science and in pop culture about dolphins living in an
internet-like world of distributed cognition (Denise Herzing and Peter Tyack
both use it for instance) and I'd like to know if there was actual contact.
 Nelson seems to have worked for Lilly as a photographer
http://www.livinginternet.com/w/wi_nelson.htm and Graham Burnett’s Sounding
of the Whale (2012, p. 615) mentions Nelson’s work with Lilly briefly.  Do
you know of any citations in Nelson or Licklider to Lilly’s work, or to
dolphins as metaphors for distributed computing? <<<<

Best wishes,

Tom