![Vannevar Bush portrait](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Vannevar_Bush_portrait.jpg)
Memex is a hypothetical electromechanical device for interacting with
microform
Microforms are scaled-down reproductions of documents, typically either films or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or of the original document size. F ...
documents and described in
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime ...
's 1945 article "
As We May Think
"As We May Think" is a 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush which has been described as visionary and influential, anticipating many aspects of information society. It was first published in ''The Atlantic'' in July 1945 and republished in an abridged v ...
". Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which individuals would compress and store all of their books, records, and communications, "mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility". The individual was supposed to use the memex as an automatic personal
filing system, making the memex "an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory".
[.] The name memex is a
portmanteau
A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of words[hypertext
Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typi ...](_blank)
systems, eventually leading to the creation of the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...
, and
personal knowledge base
A personal knowledge base (PKB) is an electronic tool used to express, capture, and later retrieve the personal knowledge of an individual. It differs from a traditional database in that it contains subjective material particular to the owner, th ...
software. The hypothetical implementation depicted by Bush for the purpose of concrete illustration was based upon a document bookmark list of static
microfilm
Microforms are scaled-down reproductions of documents, typically either photographic film, films or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or of the origin ...
pages and lacked a true hypertext system, where parts of pages would have internal structure beyond the common textual format.
Development
An electromechanical memex device
In "
As We May Think
"As We May Think" is a 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush which has been described as visionary and influential, anticipating many aspects of information society. It was first published in ''The Atlantic'' in July 1945 and republished in an abridged v ...
",
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime ...
describes a memex as an electromechanical device enabling individuals to develop and read a large self-contained research library, create and follow associative trails of links and personal annotations, and recall these trails at any time to share them with other researchers. This device would closely mimic the associative processes of the human mind, but it would be gifted with permanent recollection. As Bush writes, "Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race".
The technology used would have been a combination of electromechanical controls and
microfilm
Microforms are scaled-down reproductions of documents, typically either photographic film, films or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or of the origin ...
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. A memex would hypothetically read and write content on these microfilm reels, using electric photocells to read coded symbols recorded next to individual microfilm frames while the reels spun at high speed, stopping on command. The coded symbols would enable the memex to index, search, and link content to create and follow associative trails.
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.
According to Bush, memex could become "a sort of mechanized private file and library". The memex device as described by Bush "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."
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).
Other features
According to Bush, 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."
In September 1945,
''Life'' magazine published an illustration by
Alfred D. Crimi showing the "Memex desk". According to ''Life'' magazine, the Memex desk "would instantly bring files and material on an subject to the operator's fingertips". The mechanical core of the desk would also include "a mechanism which automatically photographs longhand notes, pictures and letters, the file them in the desk for future reference."
Extending, storing, and consulting the record of the species
Bush's 1945 "
As We May Think
"As We May Think" is a 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush which has been described as visionary and influential, anticipating many aspects of information society. It was first published in ''The Atlantic'' in July 1945 and republished in an abridged v ...
" idea for the memex extended far beyond a mechanism that 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:
Legacy
Bush said of his "
As We May Think
"As We May Think" is a 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush which has been described as visionary and influential, anticipating many aspects of information society. It was first published in ''The Atlantic'' in July 1945 and republished in an abridged v ...
" memex device 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
A vacuum tube, electron tube, valve (British usage), or tube (North America), is a device that controls electric current flow in a high vacuum between electrodes to which an electric potential difference has been applied.
The type known as a ...
."
Michael Buckland Michael Keeble Buckland (born 1941) is an emeritus professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and co-director of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative.
Buckland was born and grew up in England. He entered library work as a trainee at th ...
concluded that Bush's 1945 vision for an information retrieval machine is unhistorically viewed in relation to the subsequent development of electronic
computer
A computer is a machine that can be programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as C ...
technology. Buckland studied the historical background of
information retrieval
Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the process of obtaining information system resources that are relevant to an information need from a collection of those resources. Searches can be based on full-text or other co ...
in and before 1939 because the Memex was based on Bush's work during 1938–1940 in building a photoelectric
microfilm
Microforms are scaled-down reproductions of documents, typically either photographic film, films or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or of the origin ...
selector, an electronic retrieval technology invented by
Emanuel Goldberg
Emanuel Goldberg ( he, עמנואל גולדברג; yi, עמנואל גאָלדבערג; russian: Эмануэль Гольдберг) (born: 31 August 1881; died: 13 September 1970) was an Israeli physicist and inventor. He was born in Moscow a ...
for
Zeiss Ikon
Carl Zeiss AG (), branded as ZEISS, is a German manufacturer of optical systems and optoelectronics, founded in Jena, Germany in 1846 by optician Carl Zeiss. Together with Ernst Abbe (joined 1866) and Otto Schott (joined 1884) he laid the f ...
in the 1920s. According to Buckland, the legacy of Bush is twofold: a significant engineering achievement in building a rapid prototype microfilm selector, and "a speculative article" which through "the social prestige of its author, has had an immediate and lasting effect in stimulating others."
The pioneer of
human–computer interaction
Human–computer interaction (HCI) is research in the design and the use of computer technology, which focuses on the interfaces between people (users) and computers. HCI researchers observe the ways humans interact with computers and design tec ...
Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Carl Engelbart (January 30, 1925 – July 2, 2013) was an American engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly ...
was inspired by Bush's proposal for a co-evolution between humans and machines. In a 1999 publication, Engelbart recollects that reading "As We May Think" in 1945 infected him with the idea of building a mechanism that could navigate and extend the pool of human knowledge. Around 1961, Engelbart re-read Bush's article, and from 1962 onward Engelbart developed a series of technical designs. Engelbart updated the Memex microfilm storage desk and thereby arrived at a pioneering vision for a
personal computer
A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...
connected to an
electronic visual display
An electronic visual display, informally a screen, is a display device for presentation of images, text, or video transmitted electronically, without producing a permanent record. Electronic visual displays include television sets, computer mon ...
and a
mouse
A mouse ( : mice) is a small rodent. Characteristically, mice are known to have a pointed snout, small rounded ears, a body-length scaly tail, and a high breeding rate. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse (''Mus musculus' ...
pointing device
A pointing device is a human interface device that allows a user to input spatial (i.e., continuous and multi-dimensional) data to a computer. CAD systems and graphical user interfaces (GUI) allow the user to control and provide data to t ...
. In 1962, Engelbart sent Bush a draft article for comment, Bush never replied. The article was published in 1963 under the title "A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man's Intellect".
In 1965,
J. C. R. Licklider
Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (; March 11, 1915 – June 26, 1990), known simply as J. C. R. or "Lick", was an American psychologistMiller, G. A. (1991), "J. C. R. Licklider, psychologist", ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of Am ...
dedicated his book "Libraries of the Future" to Bush. Licklider wrote that he had often heard of the memex and "trails of reference", even before he had read "As We May Think". Also in 1965,
Ted Nelson
Theodor Holm Nelson (born June 17, 1937) is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms ''hypertext'' and ''hypermedia'' in 1963 and published them in 1965. Nelson coined the terms ''transcl ...
coined the word
hypertext
Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typi ...
in a paper that quoted Bush's memex idea at length. In 1968, Nelson collaborated with
Andries van Dam
Andries "Andy" van Dam (born December 8, 1938) is a Dutch-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 hyper ...
to implement the
Hypertext Editing System
The Hypertext Editing System, or HES, was an early hypertext research project conducted at Brown University in 1967 by Andries van Dam, Ted Nelson, and several Brown students.Brown University Department of Computer Science. (23 May 2019)A Half-C ...
(HES). In his 1987 book entitled "
Literary Machines
''Literary Machines'' (short title) is a book first published in 1981 by Ted Nelson, and republished nine times by 1993. It offers an extensive overview of Nelson's term "hypertext" as well as Nelson's Project Xanadu. It also includes other theor ...
", Nelson defined hypertext as "non-sequential writing with reader-controlled links". In 2000,
Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profess ...
published a statement, acknowledging the influence of hypertext, the work of Engelbart and Bush's "As We May Think" on the development of the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...
. In 2003,
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
promoted a
life-logging
A lifelog is a personal record of one's daily life in a varying amount of detail, for a variety of purposes. The record contains a comprehensive dataset of a human's activities. The data could be used to increase knowledge about how people liv ...
research project under the name
MyLifeBits
MyLifeBits is a life-logging experiment begun in 2001. It is a Microsoft Research project inspired by Vannevar Bush's hypothetical Memex computer system. The project includes full-text search, text and audio annotations, and hyperlinks. The "exper ...
as an attempt to fulfill Bush's memex vision.
1959 Memex II
In 1959,
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime ...
described an improved "Memex II". In the manuscript draft of "Memex II" he wrote, "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 '
facsimile
A facsimile (from Latin ''fac simile'', "to make alike") is a copy or reproduction of an old book, manuscript, map, Old master print, art print, or other item of historical value that is as true to the original source as possible. It differs from ...
s' 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."
[.]
1967 Memex revisited
In 1967,
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime ...
published a retrospective article entitled "Memex Revisited"in his book ''Science Is Not Enough''. Published 22 years after his initial conception of the Memex, Bush details the various technological advancements that have made his vision a possibility. Specifically, Bush cites photocells, transistors, cathode ray tubes, magnetic and videotape, "high-speed electric circuits", and "miniaturization of solid-state devices" such as the TV and radio. The article claims that
magnetic tape
Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic storage made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on the earlier magnetic wire recording from Denmark. Devices that use magne ...
would be central to the creation of a modern Memex device. The erasable quality of the tape is of special significance, as this would allow for modification of information stored in the proposed Memex.
In the 1967 article "Memex Revisited", Bush stresses the continued importance of supplementing "how creative men think" and relates that the systems for indexing data are still insufficient and rely too much on linear pathways rather than the association-based system of the human brain. Bush writes that a machine with the "speed and flexibility" of the brain is not attainable, but improvements could be made in regard to the capacity to obtain informational "permanence and clarity".
Bush also relates that, unlike digital technology, Memex would be of no significant aid to business or profitable ventures, and as a consequence, its development would occur only long after the mechanization of libraries and the introduction of what he describes as the specialized "group machine", which would be useful for the sharing of ideas in fields such as medicine. Furthermore, although Bush discusses the compressional ability and rapidity so key to modern machines, he relates that speed will not be an integral part of Memex, stating that a tenth of a second would be an acceptable interval for its data retrieval, rather than the billionths of a second that modern computers are capable of. "For Memex," he writes, "the problem is not swift access, but selective access". Bush states that although the code-reading and potential linking capabilities of the rapid selector would be key to the creation of Memex, there is still an issue of enabling "moderately rapid access to really large memory storage". There is an issue concerning selection, Bush conveys, and despite the fact that improvements have been made in the speed of digital selection, according to Bush, "selection, in the broad sense, is still a stone adze in the hands of the cabinetmaker". Bush goes on to discuss the record-making process and how Memex could incorporate systems of voice-control and user-propagated learning.He proposes a machine that could respond to "simple remarks" as well as build trailsbased on its user's "habits of association," as Belinda Barnet described them in "The Technical Evolution of Vannevar Bush's Memex." Barnet also makes the distinction between the idea of a constructive Memex and the "permanent trails" described in ''As We May Think,'' and attributes Bush's machine learning concepts to
Claude Shannon
Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American people, American mathematician, electrical engineering, electrical engineer, and cryptography, cryptographer known as a "father of information theory".
As a 21-year-o ...
's mechanical mouse and work with "feedback and
machine learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence.
Machine ...
".
See also
*
AltaVista
AltaVista was a Web search engine established in 1995. It became one of the most-used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand, but based all AltaVista searches on its own sear ...
*
Card file
A (German: "slip box", plural ) or card file consists of small items of information stored on paper slips or cards that may be linked to each other through subject headings or other metadata such as numbers and tags. A book on the same topic ...
*
Commonplace book
Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are simi ...
*
Dublin Core
220px, Logo image of DCMI, which formulates Dublin Core
The Dublin Core, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), is a set of fifteen "core" elements (properties) for describing resources. This fifteen-element Dublin Core has ...
*
Hypomnema
Hypomnema (Greek. ὑπόμνημα, plural ὑπομνήματα, ''hypomnemata''), also spelled hupomnema, is a Greek word with several translations into English including a reminder, a note, a public record, a commentary, an anecdotal record, ...
*
Intelligence amplification
Intelligence amplification (IA) (also referred to as cognitive augmentation, machine augmented intelligence and enhanced intelligence) refers to the effective use of information technology in augmenting human intelligence. The idea was first pro ...
*
Metadata
Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:
* Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...
*
Mundaneum
The Mundaneum was an institution which aimed to gather together all the world's knowledge and classify it according to a system called the Universal Decimal Classification. It was developed at the turn of the 20th century by Belgian lawyers Paul ...
*
Office of the future
The office of the future is a concept dating from the 1940s. It is also known as the "paperless office".
Memex desk and related machines
The first practical office of the future concept was probably the series of machines which were presented in ...
*
Paul Otlet
Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet (; ; 23 August 1868 – 10 December 1944) was a Belgian author, entrepreneur, lawyer and peace activist; predicting the arrival of the internet before World War II, he is among those considered to be the father of infor ...
*
Project Xanadu
Project Xanadu ( ) was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it superior to the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World ...
*
Victorian Internet
''The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers'' is a 1998 book by Tom Standage. The book was first published in September 1998 through Walker & Company and discusses the development a ...
*
Web annotation
*
World Brain
''World Brain'' is a collection of essays and addresses by the English science fiction pioneer, social reformer, evolutionary biologist and historian H. G. Wells, dating from the period of 1936–1938.Wells, H.G. (1938). ''World Brain''. Lond ...
References
Bibliography
*
*
*
*
* {{Cite book , title=The New Media Reader , publisher=MIT Press , year=2003 , isbn=978-0-262-23227-2 , editor-last=Wardrip-Fruin , editor-first=Noah , editor-last2=Montfort , editor-first2=Nick
External links
"As We May Think - A Celebration of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Vision" at Brown University
– Living Internet
Computer-related introductions in 1945
Information science
Classification systems
History of computing
History of human–computer interaction
Multimodal interaction
Human–computer interaction
History of the Internet
Hypertext
Science studies