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

A Google Memex?

[glinden]

Marissa Mayer at Google talks about Google Desktop Search as "the photographic memory of your computer." More details on my weblog post, "Google Memex".

Re:A Google Memex?

[RedWizzard]

Right. The web as it is now is much more like the Memex's database of documents than the entire system. Search engines are also part of the system as you need to be able to find the documents which information on the topic you're interested in. The Memex "trails" could be implemented as personal wikis, allowing linking to interesting pages and adding comments.

This guy was a serious visionary

[RayDude]

He predicted talking to machines in 1945. We still ain't there yet. Well, call a baby bell and we're almost there, ALMOST.

I didn't have time to give the article a full read, but this guy was way, way ahead of his time. He wanted to find ways to store our knowledge. He wanted a scientist to be able to record his words onto paper medium via some devices which had been demonstrated at the world's fair. He even predicted using radio to report from the field and record in his lab.

I suspect he would appreciate our hard drives, computers, and iPods... Heh.

I look forward to reading the rest later.

Raydude

Re:This guy was a serious visionary

[dancpsu]

Well, from what it looks like, the extensions that he thought of he had already come in contact with through worlds fairs and such. His ideas might have been visionary, but the details of what he thought would make them happen were quite a bit off.

It influenced Doug Engelbart...

[Traf-O-Data-Hater]

...who read the article at the end of WWII whilst stationed in the Philippines http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0035.html

what about Doug Engelbart?!

[Anonymous Coward]

(assuming anyone bothers to mod this AC post)

Doug Engelbart is that guy who invented the mouse, and worked with Alan Kay at Xerox PARC on the subject of using computers to augment human communication and cognition.

http://www.invisiblerevolution.net/engelbart/

Engelbart was largely influenced by Vannevar Bush's 'As We May Think'.

Of course, if you're a *real* computer scientist, this is all old hat to you!

Re:Interesting article.

[maxpublic]

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.

Perhaps for those under 40, or who don't have children. Old age and rug rats quickly make the quiet life quite appealing, and the ability to throw out unneeded stimuli as good as gold.

Max

Re:Interesting article.

[fbartho]

whats interesting is that I find that I planned to go to bed awhile ago, my brain being tired from all the demands I've been putting on it lately, and then I felt the need to catch up on slashdot, the various blogs I read, and other such sites, invariably finding several extremely interesting articles of things that I would love researching if given sufficient time. I've decided to cut this off now after posting this, but the constant stream of learinng reading, investigating and researching is exhilirating and draining at the same time, I constantly feel the need to absorb things from the web, and yet there is always more, and when sleep requirements force me to end the learning something feels unfulfilled inside me. I have a limited time on this planet, and not reading, not studying, not absorbing something during those hours of sleep feels like I'm squandering my time, even if that time is desperately needed simply to assimilate my past experiences.

I want timetravel

[FLAGGR]

I wish I could go back in time, get a guy like this, sit him down in front of my apple computer, hooked up to a 23" moniter, wireless keyboard and mouse, show him all the drop shadows in osx, open and save some files, and reopen them, to show him it remembered what I wrote. Play some FPS online and call people n00b's over the microphone, load up some solar system simulator, draw a picture in gimp, print it on my photoprinter/copier/scanner, and then let him play with it. Show him instant messaging, then open Firefox and show him the web (not goatse, we need to go slowly, lets say wikipedia)

After that, I would open up the mac mini, and let him wonder where everthing is stored, how the little hunk of plastic and metal can make that tv its hooked up to do all those things.

Then, I would take him to the hospital for his heartattack.

Python implementation of Memex

[Paul Fernhout]

Here is a Python implementation of Memex I wrote, built on top of my Pointrel data repository system.
It was tested under Debian GNU/Linux and Python 2.3 with TK.

Download "Pointrel20030812.2 For Py" from here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
The implementation is in the included sample file "tkPointrelMemex.py".

It isn't an exact match (it is a little more general in some ways, including multiple item viewer windows), but it covers the basic functionality of adding text items, making trails of them, and marking indexes on the trails.

To use the demo, after untarring and so on, type "python tkPointrelMemex.py" and when you get the GUI up, in the "Pointrel Memex Item Viewer" window, select the "Long Bow" trail in the panel beneath the "Update Annotation" button, and then you can use the navigation buttons (first, previous, index, next, last) to move through the trail.

You can also look at a view of trails in the "Pointrel Memex Trail Viewer" windows.

There is only one current trail at a time, shown in the Trail Viewer window. To add a new item, edit the text in the top panel in the Item Viewer window and click "Add from edit". The item is now added to the "ALL ITEMS" trail (which is everything in the system), and that "All ITEMS" trail will show up in the list of all trails the item is in near the bottom of the window. Assuming you are the "Long Bow" trail is the current trail indicated in the Trail Viewer window, you can then click on "Add to current trail" in the Item Viewer window and it will be added to the end of the "Long Bow" trail.

One difference in this program from the real Memex concept Bush describes is that trails are more first class objects in the implementation, whereas in what is described in Memex what he calls trails are more named links and a trail is essentially following identically named links. I think when I first implemented (back around 2001) an issue came up with the Memex description allowing trails to branch in a way that seemed counter to the rest of what he described for trails. Anyway, this implementation is a basis for improvements or changes, at least. It would not be that hard to remove some functionality (making it a single window with two viewers) and change the trail following slightly to be even closer to what he describes.

For fun, I also included some source code (including for the program itself) for it in the sample archive loaded by Memex on startup, so you can see Memex's (limited) potential to be an IDE with integrated versioning. It would take another button to actually launch the viewed Python code though.

In theory, it should also be multi-user on a system where the repository has appropriate shared permissions (supported by the underling Pointrel data repository system, and having to manually click on "Reload trails list"), but I have not tested that functionality much.