J.C.R. Licklider
Also: Lick
Foresaw human–computer symbiosis and funded the research that became interactive computing and the internet.
J.C.R. Licklider was an American psychologist who became one of computing's great patrons and prophets. His 1960 paper Man–Computer Symbiosis argued that the point of computers was not to replace human thinking but to couple with it — a tight partnership in which people set the goals and machines handle the parts they do best. See the idea of man–computer symbiosis.
As a director at ARPA in the early 1960s he funded much of what became modern computing: time-sharing, interactive systems, and the research that led to the ARPANET and so to the internet. He wrote, only half in jest, of an "Intergalactic Computer Network" years before one existed. Much of the tools-for-thought tradition flows from the people and projects he backed.