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Vannevar and his memex



Edupage named Vannevar an "honorary subscriber" - and in doing so quoted from another, later paper he wrote about memex. This time - at least in what's excerpted - there's no talk of cute girls pulling levers for him.

Carlene

--

Today's Honorary Subscriber is Vannevar Bush (1890-1974), scientist,
inventor, administrator, educator, and author of the ground-breaking 1945
article, "As We May Think," in which he speculated on how a machine might be
created to assist human reasoning; this machine, which he dubbed "memex," in
various ways anticipated (by half a century!) hypermedia and the World Wide
Web.  He invented the Bush Differential Analyser; was Dean of Engineering at
MIT; and served as science advisor to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman during
World War II.
     In his memoir "Pieces of the Action" (1970) Vannevar Bush revisited the
idea of memex first described in his earlier (1945) paper:
     "The heart of the idea is that of associative indexing whereby a
particular item is caused to select another at once and automatically.  The
user of the machine, as he feeds items into it, ties them together by coding
to form trails.
     "For the usual method of retrieving an item from storage we use a
process of proceeding from subclass to subclass.  Thus in consulting a
dictionary or an index, we follow the first letter, then the second, and so
on.  The rapid selector worked this way.  Practically all data retrieval in
the great computers follows this method.
     "The brain and the memex operate on an entirely different basis.  With
an item in consciousness, or before one, another allied item is suggested,
and the brain or the memex almost instantly jumps to the second item, which
suggests a third, and so on.  Thus there are built up trails of association
in the memory, of brain or machine.  These trails bifurcate, cross other
trails, become very complex.  If not used they fade out; if much used they
become emphasized.  Thus a desired item may be found far more rapidly than
by use of a clumsy index."