1945 Memex

Discussion in 'Gadgets & Tech Talk' started by Ken Anderson, Nov 28, 2018.

  1. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    On your desk, you might have a virtual display device with multiple windows, a keyboard, and special controls. This device allows you to access vast amounts of material, including encyclopedias adapted to this media. When you find the material you like, you can record the links to it, or reuse those links in other material.

    This, of course, could describe the way that we use the Internet. However, it also describes a machine that was first envisioned by a man named Vannevar Bush in 1945. In a magazine article published in 1945, Bush described his vision as an "enlarged intimate supplement to his memory," and referred to it as Memex.

    The article was titled, As We May Think, and it appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in July of 1945, and later discussed in Life Magazine, which included the artwork.

    memex.jpg

    A Presidential Science Advisor, Bush glossed over some of the details, such as how to get the machine to do what he wanted it to do, but he assumed that a means to that end would be found, probably using vacuum tubes.

    Eventually, it was done with the descendants of these tubes, known as transistors - billions of them on silicon chips. Bush foresaw a network but assumed that it would be operated by the Post Office.

    Bush was the head of President Roosevelt's Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II when he oversaw the rapid development of many technologies, such as radar, antibiotics, proximity fuses, jet planes, homing torpedoes, and the Manhattan Project, which Truman wasn't told about until he took office.

    Bush envisioned the Memex to be like an ordinary desk, but on top would be slanting translucent screens, a keyboard, a transparent platen that acted like a scanner, and some buttons and levers. He described the Memex as being preloaded with a library of books, journals, and magazines, using a microfilm technology that he had written about earlier, but which had not yet been developed. There would be a facility for adding notations to individual items, and the user would be able to add his personal books, records, and communications to the database.

    As he envisioned, retrieval of any one item would be immediate, by punching in a code. Forward and backward buttons would allow the user to navigate through an item, and there would be a special button to allow the user to jump to the item's index.

    One item could be left on the screen while calling up another item on a second screen.

    The user would keep a log book of codes under handy mnemonic names. Then the user would record the codes of items of a particular topic, stringing them all together in a process that Bush called associative indexing.

    Bush wanted his Memex to use associative indexing on the assumption that this would approximate the workings of the human mind - thinking about one topic calls up other topics that are associated with it. In the mind, the creation of trails between associated items is fast and complex, but transitory. The Memex would allow a permanent record.

    People would publish trails of associative items that would be useful for various purposes, or within specific professions. Every Memex was assumed to have the same bulk contents and would receive periodic updates through the mail. His article stated that microfilmed material could be mailed cheaply, but he does not otherwise get into the specifics of how the updates would be managed. The publication was to be through a microfilm reproducer.

    In later writings, Bush speculated that professional and scientific journals would no longer be produced on paper, but as Memex database updates, possibly delivered by fax.

    Bush also called for the machine to have speech recognition as an input method, and speculated on the possibility of a direct brain interface.

    So, when we compare Bush's vision of the Memex with today's computer and the Internet, we have...
    • Microfilm storage / Electronic storage
    • Storage of personal correspondence and records in a desk device / Storage of personal correspondence and records in a desktop device of cloud
    • Slanting translucent screens / Computer displays
    • Multiple display windows / Multiple display windows
    • Keyboards / Keyboards
    • Back-Forward buttons / Back/Forward buttons on a keyboard and in screen icons
    • Mnemonic address codes / URLs
    • Associative trails / Hypertext
    • Logs of associative trails / Browser favorites and browser history logs
    • Published associative trails / Wikis, news portals, linked blogs
    • Index page access via dedicated buttons / Homepage access via dedicated buttons
    • Ability to add notations to data / Typically, you can edit only your own data online
    • Access to a million books / Access to millions of book equivalents
    • Data distribution by mail / Data distribution by email
    • Microfilm reproducers / Printers, email, web pages
    • Professional and scientific publication via memex database updates / Professional and scientific publications via websites
    • Speech recognition / Speech recognition
    • Direct mind input / Perhaps not yet, but people are working on it
    One current web entry that does not appear in Bush's speculation is that of the search engine.

    Bush's Memex was never built. As for his idea of having a million books that fit into a desk, there was an earlier attempt to do so by using DVDs connected to something like a jukebox. Today, they make hard drives that could hold the contents of a million books, but that dream was mostly fulfilled through the Internet and the World Wide Web, which has features that closely resemble the Memex.

    Interestingly a project named for Bush's Memex was launched by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA.
     
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  2. Shirley Martin

    Shirley Martin Supreme Member
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    He was a visionary. Amazing, isn't it? What do you think will be next?
     
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