Vannevar

For my assignment in Electronic Writing, I have to write this reading journal. Only 100 words per 'reading'. This is more than 100 words.. A lot more. Crap, crap and crap. It is due tomorrow and this is all I have so far.. There are many more.. I don't know how the hell I am going to manage to get it all done in time.. Shit. This is very interesting reading though. Vannevar was an interesting fellow.


As We May Think – By Vannevar Bush
The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945

Vannevar Bush made some impressive predictions in his article from 1945. The editors comment about Dr.Bush calling for ‘a new relationship between man and the sum of our knowledge’ didn’t become clear until I have read the article. He used the current knowledge of Leibnitz’ calculating machine, Babbages arithmetical machine as well as photography, facsimile, radio and television to predict/ wish for many things that have come true (he imagined that Encyclopedia Britannia could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox) – and in conclusion – he wanted HYPERTEXT. He called it TRAILS – maybe even a better word to describe hypertext.
Bush says that for a RECORD to be useful to science, it must be continuously extended, stored and consulted. He named this machine Memex, in which one can store books, films – anything and everything! His trails are links between these records.
More important than his pinpointed predictions however are his thoughts of the use: ‘To free the brains for something more than repetitive detail..’ His Memex is an ‘enlarged initimate supplement to mans memory’. He pondered the difficulty that the human brain does not work like a machines; ‘The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association.’ He wanted a selection by association rather than mere indexing to be mechanized, and this is exactly what his Memex would do in something he called ASSOCIATE INDEXING ‘The process of tying two items together is the important thing’. This would so create TRAILS, to be shared with others or consulted later. He even describes a new profession: TRAIL BLAZERS.
His idea of tapping directly into the electronic impulses of the brain to ones memory has so far only come true in the movies.