Friday, May 16, 2008

As We May Think

This famous article by Vannevar Bush can be pretty hard to picture at times. "One can now picture a future investigator in his laboratory. His hands are free, and he is not anchored. As he moves about and observes, he photographs and comments. Time is automatically recorded to tie the two records together" (Bush, 4). Actually, no I cannot picture that investigator, but I do think I know what Mr. Bush is talking about. He is talking about an Internet that we are interacting with as we literally go through our days. Our "links" are ours to make as we walk about, like some sort of informational Jedi.

What is most important about this article however, is that Vannevar Bush describes his famous fictional memex. As more and more information is rummaged through on the tiny memex cards, tiny links are created between seemingly disparate ideas. These are familiar to the links that we have on the Internet today. The cards he describes are sort of like the Internet pages of the present day.

One could make an argument against the significance of Bush's Memex. It's not like Vannevar Bush delivered "The Mother of All Demos" or anything earth-shattering like that. He simply had a great idea that ended up proving to blend into traits of our present Internet.

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