It should be possible, in a 'debreviation' mode, to type 'clr' on the keyboard and have 'The Council on Library Resources, Inc.' appear on the displa… - J. C. R. Licklider

It is probably dangerous to use this theory of information in fields for which it was not designed, but I think the danger will not keep people from using it. In psychology, at least in the psychology of communication, it seems to fit with a fair approximation. When it occurs that the learnability of material is roughly proportional to the information content calculated | by the theory, I think it looks interesting. There may have to be modifications, of course. For example, I think that the human receiver of information gets more out of a message that is encoded into a broad vocabulary (an extensive set of symbols) and presented at a slow pace, than from a message, equal in information content, that is encoded into a restricted set of symbols and presented at a faster pace. Nevertheless, the elementary parts of the theory appear to be very useful. I say it may be dangerous to use them, but I don’t think the danger will scare us off.

[The computer is also the direct descendant of the telegraph as it enables one... to] "transmit information without transporting material"

It seems reasonable to envision, for a time 10 or 15 years hence, a 'thinking center' that will incorporate the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval.
The picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire services. In such a system, the speed of the computers would be balanced, and the cost of the gigantic memories and the sophisticated programs would be divided by the number of users.