6 THE COMPUTER BECOMES A COMMUNICATIONS PLATFORM

By 1968, MIT's J. C. R. Licklider had refined his idea of "human computer symbiosis" into a new vision for the power of online systems: "The Computer as a Communications Device." "In a few years," according to a "startling claim" made at the opening of his paper of the same name, "men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face."
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Thanks to Licklider and the community of ARPA-affiliated colleagues he had jokingly referred to a few years earlier as an "intergalactic computer network," many of the applications we now think of as features of the Internet were already running by the 1970s on timesharing systems, including electronic mail, discussion forums, online education, and multiplayer games.
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The ARPANET itself, from which the Internet evolved, began in the late 1960s as a way to interconnect timesharing systems. Early efforts to get ordinary people online, most successfully with the French Minitel system, rested on providing cheap home terminals able to connect to timesharing computers providing services such as banking, shopping, and news.