Memex
Encyclopedia
The memex is the name given by Vannevar Bush
to the hypothetical proto-hypertext
system he described in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly
article As We May Think
(AWMT). Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which an individual would compress and store all of their books, records, and communications, "mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility". The memex would provide an "enlarged intimate supplement to one's memory". The concept of the memex influenced the development of early hypertext
systems (eventually leading to the creation of the World Wide Web
) and personal knowledge base
software.
The technology used would have been a combination of electromechanical controls, microfilm cameras and readers, all integrated into a large desk. Most of the microfilm library would have been contained within the desk, but the user could add or remove microfilm reels at will.
The top of the desk would have slanting translucent screens on which material could be projected for convenient reading. The top of the memex would have a transparent platen. When a longhand note, photograph, memoranda, or other things were placed on the platen, the depression of a lever would cause the item to be photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film.
The memex would become "'a sort of mechanized private file and library'.-Bush. It would use microfilm storage, dry photography, and analog computing to give postwar scholars access to a huge, indexed repository of knowledge-any section of which could be called up with a few keystrokes."
The vision of the memex predates, and is credited as the inspiration for, the first practical hypertext
systems of the 1960s. Bush describes the memex and other visions of As We May Think
as projections of technology known in the 1930s and 1940s - in the spirit of Jules Verne
or Arthur C. Clarke
's 1945 proposal to orbit geosynchronous satellite
s for global telecommunication. The memex proposed by Bush would create trails of links connecting sequences of microfilm frames, rather than links in the modern sense where a hyperlink
connects a single word, phrase or picture within a document and a local or remote destination.
to search for a keyword, obtain a list of matches, repeatedly use the "open in new tab" feature of the Web browser, and then visit each tab sequentially). Modern hypertext systems with word and phrase-level linking offer more sophistication in connecting relevant information, but until the rise of wiki
and other social software
models, modern hypertext systems have rarely imitated Bush in providing individuals with the ability to create personal trails and share them with colleagues - or publish them widely.
. The September 10, 1945, Life magazine article showed the first illustrations of what the memex desk
could look like, as well as illustrations of a head-mounted camera
, which a scientist could wear while doing experiments, and a typewriter
capable of voice recognition and of reading text by speech synthesis
. Considered together, these memex machines were probably the earliest practical description of what we would call today the Office of the future
.
"Given a memex, a scholar could create her own knowledge tools as connections within reams of information, share these tools, and use complexes of tools to create yet more sophisticated knowledge that could in turn be deployed toward this work. The memex has been envisioned as a means of turning an information explosion into a knowledge explosion. This remains one of the defining dreams of new media
."
Bush states that "technical difficulties of all sorts have been ignored," but that, "also ignored are means as yet unknown which may come any day to accelerate technical progress as violently as did the advent of the thermionic tube." Indeed, anyone who stops to consider the performance consequences of trail following - let alone link-directed pointer-chasing - over a microfilm library of near universal scope should quickly come to the conclusion that microfilm is no more appropriate a technology for implementing AWMT's vision than Jules Verne
's cannon is an appropriate technology for sending astronauts to the Moon. In both cases the vision may be more significant than the specific technology used to describe it. See Michael Buckland
's conclusion: "Bush's contributions in this area were twofold: (i) A significant engineering achievement by the team under his leadership in building a truly rapid prototype microfilm selector, and (ii) a speculative article, 'As We May Think,' which, through its skillful writing and the social prestige of its author, has had an immediate and lasting effect in stimulating others."
In "Memex: Getting Back on the Trail", Tim Oren argues that Bush's original vision expressed in AWMT describes a "... private device into which public encyclopedia's and colleague's trails might be inserted to be joined with the owner's own work."
However, in Bush's manuscript draft of "Memex II" of 1959 (also published in ), Bush says, "Professional societies will no longer print papers..." and states that individuals will either order sets of papers to come on tape - complete with photographs and diagrams - or download 'facsimiles' by telephone. Each society would maintain a 'master memex' containing all papers, references, tables "intimately interconnected by trails, so that one may follow a detailed matter from paper to paper, going back through the classics, recording criticism in the margins."
or a hypertext element set like the Dublin core
. Instead, when the user made an entry, such as a new or annotated manuscript, typescript or image, he was expected to index and describe it in his personal code book. By consulting his code book, the user could retrace annotated and generated entries.
, in an article published in 1992, suggested that the memex was severely flawed because Bush did not thoroughly understand information science
and had a bad opinion of indices and classification scheme
s: "Bush thought that the creation of arbitrary associations between individual records was the basis of memory, so he wanted 'mem(ory-)ex', or 'Memex instead of index'. The result was a personalized, but superficial and inherently self-defeating design."
Buckland was writing at the very infancy of the World Wide Web
(WWW) which was first introduced during 1991 and not widely experienced until 1993. At introduction, the web was predominantly link based (associational). Classification and indexing efforts followed, with automatic indexing in the form of search engine
s quickly gaining prominence over classification efforts, while both remained complementary to links. Whether Buckland would not have applied this same denigration of Memex equally to the WWW as it flourished in its early years is unclear. While it has since become clear that an index (search engine) is the most expedient entre into unfamiliar subject matter, associational links have remained an effective navigational method for obtaining intensive coverage of a subject area under study. In the Internet era, links are typically incorporated during authorship, while indices are almost always mechanical. Bush's unwillingness to place greater prominence on indices might have stemmed from his inability to visualize a near-term mechanical process for their creation, rather than a failure to recognize their utility once obtained.
Buckland also states that Bush's idea should be viewed from the historical perspective of microfilm technology developed prior to 1945 rather than based on the power and versatility of digital computer technology developed after 1945. Buckland summarizes the very advanced pre-World War II development of microfilm-based rapid retrieval devices, specifically the microfilm-based workstation proposed by Leonard Townsend in 1938 and the microfilm and photoelectronic based selector, patented by Emanuel Goldberg
during 1931. Buckland states: "The literature on documentation in the 1930s was as preoccupied with microfilm technology as it is now with computer technology and for the same reason, each being the most promising information retrieval technology of the time." Buckland notes that Bush directed creation of a photoelectronic microfilm 'rapid selector' at MIT during 1938-1940 using stroboscope
technology pioneered by his colleague Harold Edgerton. Buckland suggests that Bush and his team may not have been aware of Goldberg's earlier work when they built their 1938-1940 prototype, but that IBM
researchers and Bush's Eastman Kodak Research Laboratory sponsor certainly were. Buckland concludes: "We speculate that Bush did not independently originate the notion of an electronic microfilm selector, although that was possible. It is not surprising that the same invention sometimes occurs independently and more or less simultaneously when a need is present and the technology becomes ripe."
(see his 1962 report Augmenting Human Intellect), and also led to Ted Nelson
's groundbreaking work in concepts of hypermedia
and hypertext
.
As We May Think also predicted many kinds of technology invented after its publication in addition to hypertext
such as personal computers, the Internet
, the World Wide Web
, speech recognition
, and online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia
: "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified."
Bush's influence is still evident in research laboratories of today in Gordon Bell
's MyLifeBits
(from Microsoft Research
), which implements path
-based systems reminiscent of the Memex.
A Memex is featured in Charles Stross
' cross-genre novel The Atrocity Archives
, and its sequels. In The Fuller Memorandum
, the publication of As We May Think
is described as a "leak":
Ideas
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush was an American engineer and science administrator known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb as a primary organizer of the Manhattan Project, the founding of Raytheon, and the idea of the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer...
to the hypothetical proto-hypertext
Hypertext
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...
system he described in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic is an American magazine founded in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1857. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine. It quickly achieved a national reputation, which it held for more than a century. It was important for recognizing and publishing new writers and poets,...
article As We May Think
As We May Think
As We May Think is an essay by Vannevar Bush, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, and republished again as an abridged version in September 1945 — before and after the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan...
(AWMT). Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which an individual would compress and store all of their books, records, and communications, "mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility". The memex would provide an "enlarged intimate supplement to one's memory". The concept of the memex influenced the development of early hypertext
Hypertext
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...
systems (eventually leading to the creation of the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
) and personal knowledge base
Personal knowledge base
A personal knowledge base is an electronic tool used to express, capture, and later retrieve the personal knowledgeof an individual. It differs from a traditionaldatabase in that it contains subjective material particular to the owner,...
software.
A proto-hypertext system
In Bush's 1945 paper, he describes a memex as an electromechanical device that an individual could use to read a large self-contained research library, and add or follow associative trails of links and notes created by that individual, or recorded by other researchers.The technology used would have been a combination of electromechanical controls, microfilm cameras and readers, all integrated into a large desk. Most of the microfilm library would have been contained within the desk, but the user could add or remove microfilm reels at will.
The top of the desk would have slanting translucent screens on which material could be projected for convenient reading. The top of the memex would have a transparent platen. When a longhand note, photograph, memoranda, or other things were placed on the platen, the depression of a lever would cause the item to be photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film.
The memex would become "'a sort of mechanized private file and library'.-Bush. It would use microfilm storage, dry photography, and analog computing to give postwar scholars access to a huge, indexed repository of knowledge-any section of which could be called up with a few keystrokes."
The vision of the memex predates, and is credited as the inspiration for, the first practical hypertext
Hypertext
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...
systems of the 1960s. Bush describes the memex and other visions of As We May Think
As We May Think
As We May Think is an essay by Vannevar Bush, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, and republished again as an abridged version in September 1945 — before and after the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan...
as projections of technology known in the 1930s and 1940s - in the spirit of Jules Verne
Jules Verne
Jules Gabriel Verne was a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , A Journey to the Center of the Earth , and Around the World in Eighty Days...
or Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey, and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World. For many years, Robert A. Heinlein,...
's 1945 proposal to orbit geosynchronous satellite
Geosynchronous satellite
A geosynchronous Satellite is a satellite whose orbit on the Earth repeats regularly over points on the Earth over time. If such a satellite's orbit lies over the equator, the orbit is circular and its angular velocity is the same as the earth's, then it is called a geostationary satellite...
s for global telecommunication. The memex proposed by Bush would create trails of links connecting sequences of microfilm frames, rather than links in the modern sense where a hyperlink
Hyperlink
In computing, a hyperlink is a reference to data that the reader can directly follow, or that is followed automatically. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks...
connects a single word, phrase or picture within a document and a local or remote destination.
Associative trails
An associative trail as conceived by Bush would be a way to create a new linear sequence of microfilm frames across any arbitrary sequence of microfilm frames by creating a chained sequence of links in the way just described, along with personal comments and side trails. At the time Bush saw the current ways of indexing information as limiting and instead proposed a way to store information that was analogous to the mental association of the human brain: storing information with the capability of easy access at a later time using certain cues (in this case, a series of numbers as a code to retrieve data) The closest analogy with the modern Web browser would be to create a list of bookmarks to articles relevant to a topic, and then to have some mechanism for automatically scrolling through the articles (for example, use GoogleGoogle
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
to search for a keyword, obtain a list of matches, repeatedly use the "open in new tab" feature of the Web browser, and then visit each tab sequentially). Modern hypertext systems with word and phrase-level linking offer more sophistication in connecting relevant information, but until the rise of wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
and other social software
Social software
Social software applications include communication tools and interactive tools. Communication tools typically handle the capturing, storing and presentation of communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. Interactive tools handle mediated interactions between a...
models, modern hypertext systems have rarely imitated Bush in providing individuals with the ability to create personal trails and share them with colleagues - or publish them widely.
Other features
The memex would have features other than linking. The user could record new information on microfilm, by taking photos from paper or from a touch-sensitive translucent screen. A user could "... insert a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. ... Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him." A user could also create a copy of an interesting trail (containing references and personal annotations) and "... pass it to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into the more general trail." As observers like Tim Oren have pointed out, the memex could be considered to be a microfilm-based precursor to the personal computerPersonal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
. The September 10, 1945, Life magazine article showed the first illustrations of what the memex desk
could look like, as well as illustrations of a head-mounted camera
Camera
A camera is a device that records and stores images. These images may be still photographs or moving images such as videos or movies. The term camera comes from the camera obscura , an early mechanism for projecting images...
, which a scientist could wear while doing experiments, and a typewriter
Typewriter
A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with keys that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper. Typically one character is printed per keypress, and the machine prints the characters by making ink impressions of type elements similar to the pieces...
capable of voice recognition and of reading text by speech synthesis
Speech synthesis
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware...
. Considered together, these memex machines were probably the earliest practical description of what we would call today the Office of the future
Office of the future
The office of the future is a concept dating from the 1940s. It is also known as the "paperless office". After sixty years of unfulfilled prophecies the phrase "paperless office" has been discredited somewhat...
.
"Given a memex, a scholar could create her own knowledge tools as connections within reams of information, share these tools, and use complexes of tools to create yet more sophisticated knowledge that could in turn be deployed toward this work. The memex has been envisioned as a means of turning an information explosion into a knowledge explosion. This remains one of the defining dreams of new media
New media
New media is a broad term in media studies that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century. For example, new media holds out a possibility of on-demand access to content any time, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation and community...
."
Extending, storing, and consulting the record of the species
Bush's idea for the memex extended far beyond a mechanism which might augment the research of one individual working in isolation. In Bush's idea, the ability to connect, annotate, and share both published works and personal trails would profoundly change the process by which the "world's record" is created and used:
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. ...
The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected. -- As We May ThinkAs We May ThinkAs We May Think is an essay by Vannevar Bush, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, and republished again as an abridged version in September 1945 — before and after the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan...
Bush states that "technical difficulties of all sorts have been ignored," but that, "also ignored are means as yet unknown which may come any day to accelerate technical progress as violently as did the advent of the thermionic tube." Indeed, anyone who stops to consider the performance consequences of trail following - let alone link-directed pointer-chasing - over a microfilm library of near universal scope should quickly come to the conclusion that microfilm is no more appropriate a technology for implementing AWMT's vision than Jules Verne
Jules Verne
Jules Gabriel Verne was a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , A Journey to the Center of the Earth , and Around the World in Eighty Days...
's cannon is an appropriate technology for sending astronauts to the Moon. In both cases the vision may be more significant than the specific technology used to describe it. See Michael Buckland
Michael Buckland
Michael Keeble Buckland is an Emeritus Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and Co-Director of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative....
's conclusion: "Bush's contributions in this area were twofold: (i) A significant engineering achievement by the team under his leadership in building a truly rapid prototype microfilm selector, and (ii) a speculative article, 'As We May Think,' which, through its skillful writing and the social prestige of its author, has had an immediate and lasting effect in stimulating others."
In "Memex: Getting Back on the Trail", Tim Oren argues that Bush's original vision expressed in AWMT describes a "... private device into which public encyclopedia's and colleague's trails might be inserted to be joined with the owner's own work."
However, in Bush's manuscript draft of "Memex II" of 1959 (also published in ), Bush says, "Professional societies will no longer print papers..." and states that individuals will either order sets of papers to come on tape - complete with photographs and diagrams - or download 'facsimiles' by telephone. Each society would maintain a 'master memex' containing all papers, references, tables "intimately interconnected by trails, so that one may follow a detailed matter from paper to paper, going back through the classics, recording criticism in the margins."
Missing features: search and metadata
The AWMT paper did not describe any automatic search, nor any universal metadata scheme such as a standard library classificationLibrary classification
A library classification is a system of coding and organizing documents or library materials according to their subject and allocating a call number to that information resource...
or a hypertext element set like the Dublin core
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata terms are a set of vocabulary terms which can be used to describe resources for the purposes of discovery. The terms can be used to describe a full range of web resources: video, images, web pages etc and physical resources such as books and objects like artworks...
. Instead, when the user made an entry, such as a new or annotated manuscript, typescript or image, he was expected to index and describe it in his personal code book. By consulting his code book, the user could retrace annotated and generated entries.
Criticism
Michael BucklandMichael Buckland
Michael Keeble Buckland is an Emeritus Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and Co-Director of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative....
, in an article published in 1992, suggested that the memex was severely flawed because Bush did not thoroughly understand information science
Information science
-Introduction:Information science is an interdisciplinary science primarily concerned with the analysis, collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information...
and had a bad opinion of indices and classification scheme
Classification scheme
In metadata a classification scheme is a hierarchical arrangement of kinds of things or groups of kinds of things. Typically it is accompanied by descriptive information of the classes or groups. A classification scheme is intended to be used for an arrangement or division of individual objects...
s: "Bush thought that the creation of arbitrary associations between individual records was the basis of memory, so he wanted 'mem(ory-)ex', or 'Memex instead of index'. The result was a personalized, but superficial and inherently self-defeating design."
Buckland was writing at the very infancy of the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
(WWW) which was first introduced during 1991 and not widely experienced until 1993. At introduction, the web was predominantly link based (associational). Classification and indexing efforts followed, with automatic indexing in the form of search engine
Search engine
A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...
s quickly gaining prominence over classification efforts, while both remained complementary to links. Whether Buckland would not have applied this same denigration of Memex equally to the WWW as it flourished in its early years is unclear. While it has since become clear that an index (search engine) is the most expedient entre into unfamiliar subject matter, associational links have remained an effective navigational method for obtaining intensive coverage of a subject area under study. In the Internet era, links are typically incorporated during authorship, while indices are almost always mechanical. Bush's unwillingness to place greater prominence on indices might have stemmed from his inability to visualize a near-term mechanical process for their creation, rather than a failure to recognize their utility once obtained.
Buckland also states that Bush's idea should be viewed from the historical perspective of microfilm technology developed prior to 1945 rather than based on the power and versatility of digital computer technology developed after 1945. Buckland summarizes the very advanced pre-World War II development of microfilm-based rapid retrieval devices, specifically the microfilm-based workstation proposed by Leonard Townsend in 1938 and the microfilm and photoelectronic based selector, patented by Emanuel Goldberg
Emanuel Goldberg
Emanuel Goldberg was born in Moscow and moved first to Germany and later to Israel...
during 1931. Buckland states: "The literature on documentation in the 1930s was as preoccupied with microfilm technology as it is now with computer technology and for the same reason, each being the most promising information retrieval technology of the time." Buckland notes that Bush directed creation of a photoelectronic microfilm 'rapid selector' at MIT during 1938-1940 using stroboscope
Stroboscope
A stroboscope, also known as a strobe, is an instrument used to make a cyclically moving object appear to be slow-moving, or stationary. The principle is used for the study of rotating, reciprocating, oscillating or vibrating objects...
technology pioneered by his colleague Harold Edgerton. Buckland suggests that Bush and his team may not have been aware of Goldberg's earlier work when they built their 1938-1940 prototype, but that IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
researchers and Bush's Eastman Kodak Research Laboratory sponsor certainly were. Buckland concludes: "We speculate that Bush did not independently originate the notion of an electronic microfilm selector, although that was possible. It is not surprising that the same invention sometimes occurs independently and more or less simultaneously when a need is present and the technology becomes ripe."
Legacy
This idea directly influenced computer pioneers J.C.R. Licklider (see his 1960 paper Man-Computer Symbiosis), Douglas EngelbartDouglas Engelbart
Douglas Carl Engelbart is an American inventor, and an early computer and internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on the challenges of human-computer interaction, resulting in the invention of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs...
(see his 1962 report Augmenting Human Intellect), and also led to Ted Nelson
Ted Nelson
Theodor Holm Nelson is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963 and published it in 1965...
's groundbreaking work in concepts of hypermedia
Hypermedia
Hypermedia is a computer-based information retrieval system that enables a user to gain or provide access to texts, audio and video recordings, photographs and computer graphics related to a particular subject.Hypermedia is a term created by Ted Nelson....
and hypertext
Hypertext
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...
.
As We May Think also predicted many kinds of technology invented after its publication in addition to hypertext
Hypertext
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...
such as personal computers, the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
, the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
, speech recognition
Speech recognition
Speech recognition converts spoken words to text. The term "voice recognition" is sometimes used to refer to recognition systems that must be trained to a particular speaker—as is the case for most desktop recognition software...
, and online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
: "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified."
Bush's influence is still evident in research laboratories of today in Gordon Bell
Gordon Bell
C. Gordon Bell is an American computer engineer and manager. An early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation 1960–1966, Bell designed several of their PDP machines and later became Vice President of Engineering 1972-1983, overseeing the development of the VAX...
's MyLifeBits
MyLifeBits
MyLifeBits is a Microsoft Research project. It was inspired by Vannevar Bush's hypothetical Memex computer system. The project includes full-text search, text and audio annotations, and hyperlinks. The "experimental subject" of the project is computer scientist Gordon Bell, and the project will...
(from Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research is the research division of Microsoft created in 1991 for developing various computer science ideas and integrating them into Microsoft products. It currently employs Turing Award winners C.A.R. Hoare, Butler Lampson, and Charles P...
), which implements path
Path (graph theory)
In graph theory, a path in a graph is a sequence of vertices such that from each of its vertices there is an edge to the next vertex in the sequence. A path may be infinite, but a finite path always has a first vertex, called its start vertex, and a last vertex, called its end vertex. Both of them...
-based systems reminiscent of the Memex.
A Memex is featured in Charles Stross
Charles Stross
Charles David George "Charlie" Stross is a British writer of science fiction, Lovecraftian horror and fantasy. He was born in Leeds.Stross specialises in hard science fiction and space opera...
' cross-genre novel The Atrocity Archives
The Atrocity Archives
The Atrocity Archives contains two stories by British author Charles Stross, consisting of the short novel The Atrocity Archive and The Concrete Jungle, which won the 2005 Hugo Award for Best Novella.The stories are Lovecraftian spy thrillers involving a secret history of the 20th century,...
, and its sequels. In The Fuller Memorandum
The Fuller Memorandum
The Fuller Memorandum is the third novel by Charles Stross in his "Laundry" series of Lovecraftian spy thrillers. The previous novels in the series were The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue...
, the publication of As We May Think
As We May Think
As We May Think is an essay by Vannevar Bush, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, and republished again as an abridged version in September 1945 — before and after the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan...
is described as a "leak":
a number of the things had actually been built, using a slush fund earmarked for the Manhattan Project. The product of electromechanical engineering at its finest, not to mention its most horrendously complex, each Memex cost as much as a B-29 bomber--and contained six times as many moving parts, most of them assembled by watchmakers.
See also
People- Andries van DamAndries van DamAndries "Andy" van Dam is a Dutch-born American professor of computer science and former Vice-President for Research at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Together with Ted Nelson he contributed to the first hypertext system, HES in the late 1960s. He co-authored Computer Graphics:...
- Douglas EngelbartDouglas EngelbartDouglas Carl Engelbart is an American inventor, and an early computer and internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on the challenges of human-computer interaction, resulting in the invention of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs...
- J.C.R. Licklider
- Paul OtletPaul OtletPaul Marie Ghislain Otlet was an author, entrepreneur, visionary, lawyer and peace activist; he is one of several people who have been considered the father of information science, a field he called "documentation". Otlet created the Universal Decimal Classification, one of the most prominent...
, considered one of the fathers of information scienceInformation science-Introduction:Information science is an interdisciplinary science primarily concerned with the analysis, collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information... - Ted NelsonTed NelsonTheodor Holm Nelson is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963 and published it in 1965...
- Tim Berners-LeeTim Berners-LeeSir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, , also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web...
, creator of the World Wide WebWorld Wide WebThe World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet... - Vannevar BushVannevar BushVannevar Bush was an American engineer and science administrator known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb as a primary organizer of the Manhattan Project, the founding of Raytheon, and the idea of the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer...
Ideas
- As We May ThinkAs We May ThinkAs We May Think is an essay by Vannevar Bush, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, and republished again as an abridged version in September 1945 — before and after the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan...
- Intelligence amplificationIntelligence amplificationIntelligence amplification refers to the effective use of information technology in augmenting human intelligence...
- MundaneumMundaneumThe Mundaneum was an institution created in 1910 out of the initiative of two Belgian lawyers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine as part of their documentation science...
, the organization created in 1910 that aimed to classify all knowledge - Office of the futureOffice of the futureThe office of the future is a concept dating from the 1940s. It is also known as the "paperless office". After sixty years of unfulfilled prophecies the phrase "paperless office" has been discredited somewhat...
- Victorian InternetVictorian InternetThe Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers is a 1998 book by Tom Standage. It is about the development and uses of the electric telegraph during the second half of the 19th Century and some of the similarities the telegraph shared...
, term to describe 19th century telecommunications technologies - World Wide WebWorld Wide WebThe World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
External links
- "As We May Think" - The original article from the Atlantic Monthly archives
- "As We May Think - A Celebration of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Vision", at Brown University
- Vannevar Bush and Memex – Living Internet