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Sixty Years of Memex
CubicStar writes "Sixty years ago, Vannnevar Bush published on 'Atlantic Monthly' his seminal article on the
Memex, that computer-like device which would provide access to a huge amount of
interlinked information. At the time computers were experimental and secret but a visionary (with a shadowy edge)
proposed something which even today looks at least influential."
The problem with search engines today is that they exactly do not do what Bush was envisioning... they do not record the associations, the context, of the information. What they do well is finding a specific word, or the fact that one page points to another. In many cases, that may help with a task, but it's not the information that Memex was supposed to help with.
Memex would be like a browser history that is permanent, with the ability to annotate, comment, and add one's own private links between pages. Over time, the pages, documents, emails, and other media would be not linked just by a few hyperlinks or search keywords, but by a much more rich and useful set of associations, and more importantly, contexts. Days/months/years down the road, those contexts could help reconstruct thought patterns, discussions, and other information that is just not saved today in a search engine.
That is why the Memex was supposed to provide "immortality".
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
It's the classic article on the proto-web from the 1940's. Vannevar Bush, the guy who later was responsible for setting up the National Science Foundation (which funds most non-medical, non-defense related scientific research in the US), describes a future in which scholarly research involving many interlinking documents can be done from the desktop. Although he was thinking of an electro-mechanical rather than a digital system. the Web is pretty much what he was predicting.
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