4 ideas
In 1962 J. C. R. Licklider became the first director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office. He was a psychologist who had written the 1960 paper "Man-Computer Symbiosis." That community later produced the ARPANET in 1969, and many of its people went on to build the Alto and Ethernet at Xerox PARC in the 1970s.
Licklider's model was to pick a few brilliant researchers and give them large, open-ended grants with little oversight. He counted on them to set their own problems and to train students.
Licklider proposed that computers should be interactive partners that take over the clerical, formulating work of thinking. In his own tracking of his time, that work took about 85% of it, which would leave humans free to set goals and make judgments. The idea moved research away from batch-processed, replace-the-human automation and toward real-time interaction, time-sharing, and interfaces built around a person's thought process.
Licklider described the "Intergalactic Computer Network" as a social system: people sharing programs, data and ideas across shared machines. Time-sharing had already shown that users on one computer formed collaborative communities. Seeing the ARPANET as a tool for linking human communities, rather than for load-sharing between machines, explains why email quickly became its dominant use.