July 1945 the Atlantic Monthly published an article by Vannevar Bush, director of the U. S>Office of Scientific Research and Development titled As we may think. The article described an imaginary system for organizing information that Bush argued would meet the demands of people trying to make sense of information in an age when traditional methods were overwhelming individual's abilities to keep up. As Bush put it "The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships."
Bush believed that the world had "arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it." That something was the memex. Bush imagined the machine as a device that would utilize information that had been compressed as microfilm or some related media. He understood that shrinking the bulk of information was not enough. He argued that "one needs not only to make and store a record but also be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled at by a few."
Bush wanted to devise a system that work in concert with the human mind to access information. The way Bush explained this functionality is remarkably relevant to the operating system for the Web. Arguing that existing accession and indexing systems were linear "from subclass to subclass," Bush contented that; "The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature."
Bush's description of the memex is remarkable."Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.
In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely."
Additional information
Foreseeing the Future: The legacy of Vannevar Bush
by Erin Malone on 2002/06/16
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/foreseeing_the_future_the_legacy_of_vannevar_bush
Trailfire: Building Vannevar's Memex
Written by Richard MacManus / September 1, 2006
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/trailfire_building_memex.php
Image source
http://newmedia.wikia.com/wiki/Memex
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