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."

Comments

Interesting article.

[ShaniaTwain]

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his record more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursion may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

..except thats not exactly how it works is it? we simply add more and more stimuli to fill in the brain capacity that is no longer required for those tasks simplified by databases and search engines. It seems to be human nature, we prefer to operate in a state of constantly being bogged down, or if you prefer, blogged down.

Re:Interesting article.

[iabervon]

It seems like we've actually been freed of the need to remember things, and now are asked to pay attention to things. This is, of course, much worse for actually getting things done, because it prevents continuous thought and occupies short-term memory, which is very limited rather than long-term memory, which is copious.

I think that essentially the Peter Principle applies: more demands are placed on us until we are dysfunctional. It takes a certain amount of self-importance to refuse further demands before you're completely bogged down, and further demands are certainly no less available now than they were.

Of course, there's hope for the situation. The present demands can be managed a lot more effectively than the former demands, because you can just have your phone go to voicemail, turn off automatically checking your email, hide IM, and check all of these things when you've finished a task. It was a lot harder with the technology of 1945 to disregard the need for impractical quantities of reference material on hand for complex tasks.

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[account_deleted]

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vannevar: /van'@var/, n.

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

A bogus technological prediction or a foredoomed engineering concept, esp. one that fails by implicitly assuming that technologies develop linearly, incrementally, and in isolation from one another when in fact the learning curve tends to be highly nonlinear, revolutions are common, and competition is the rule. The prototype was Vannevar Bush's prediction of 'electronic brains' the size of the Empire State Building with a Niagara-Falls-equivalent cooling system for their tubes and relays, a prediction made at a time when the semiconductor effect had already been demonstrated. Other famous vannevars have included magnetic-bubble memory, LISP machines, videotex, and a paper from the late 1970s that computed a purported ultimate limit on areal density for ICs that was in fact less than the routine densities of 5 years later.

He didn't mention pornography once

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

It's amazing how little some humans appreciate the nature of humans. The fact that people are more likely to store gigabytes of porn on their 'memex' than encyclopedias probably didn't enter the poor little guy's head. Even though he is a human, and probably shares the same desires as the rest of us, he was still completely way off. It's not like there weren't clues. The earliest use of technologies capable of production sexual stimuli are, in fact, the production of sexual stimuli. Whether it's humans carving female figurines 30,000 years ago, or lifelike Renaissance painting and sculpture, early photographic erotica, or pornographic movies from the turn of the century, humans are much the same everywhere.