Slashdot Mirror
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."
Marissa Mayer at Google talks about Google Desktop Search as "the photographic memory of your computer." More details on my weblog post, "Google Memex".
Majestic Twelve.
"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." - Tacitus
And to think that it would be most known for selling used crap on auctions and tons of porn...
"Scientists don't change their minds, they just die." -- Max Planck
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.
Starsucks
Anyone want to sum it up for the rest of us ?
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...who read the article at the end of WWII whilst stationed in the Philippines http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0035.html
So apparently it was Bush who invented the internet, not Gore.
(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!
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.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Serial Experiments Lain
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
I wonder what Bush would think of the current state of things, where people try to patent ideas originating durring the second world war? I wonder, too, if better telling the story of the rise of the computer and internet, and the history of software would help people understand just how big the giants are that today's "great innovators" stand on the backs of. I also wonder if people understand in the land rush to make all things some form of property or ther other just how much of their own freedom, and their own ability to express and create they give away.
And I also wonder how long after the Memex's release it will be before we see Duke Nukem Forever.
-- $G
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.
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.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
...and others.
Wells, perhaps influenced by microfilm technology demonstrations he had seen at Kodak, was writing in 1938 about a world in which "any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica."
Wells also wrote that "A World Encyclopedia no longer presents itself to a modern imagination as a row of volumes printed and published once for all, but as a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared.... This Encyclopedic organization need not be concentrated now in one place; it might have the form of a network. It would centralize mentally but perhaps not physically..." Of course, he didn't envision anything like goatse... or if he did, he didn't write about it.
The bibliographer Paul Otlet (1868-1944) also had visions of information-sharing networks.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The MIT web-consortium has been working on exactly this problem with their proposal called the Semantic Net. Unfortunately, for the masses the world wide was commercially co-opted before Tim had implemented all of his ideas. Now its playing catch-up.
TEd Nelson's Xanadu Hypertext also addressed these issues. Because he didnt supply opne-source frereware like Tim did, it never caught on.