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

Two words...

[Verminator]

Majestic Twelve.

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.

[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.

[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.

What is this article about ?

[zymano]

Anyone want to sum it up for the rest of us ?

Re:What is this article about ?

[Jonathan]

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.

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:A Google Memex?

[Red Herring]

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".

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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!

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.

Re:He didn't mention pornography once

[commodoresloat]

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.

Not everyone has these priorities, you know. Believe it or not, many people do store encyclopedias, and tons of non-pornographic photos, video, music, etc. on their hard drives. Not everyone stores gigabytes of porn.

I mean, I do, myself, of course, but I've heard that there are people who don't.

Three words...

[Etcetera]

Serial Experiments Lain

Bush's Views and Modern IP

[salesgeek]

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.

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.