Meme multiplied

By a piece of pure Google happenstance I came across a link to the famous Atlantic essay, As We May Think, by Vannevar Bush which was published in July 1945.

In it Bush considers what kind of work physicists, in particular, should concentrate on once the killing is over. In his opinion the most pressing need is to be able to control & have access to the world’s great mass of information which was threatening to overwhelm man’s capacity to find & absorb. To this end should be harnessed the latest inventions & methods of mass production, for “The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.”

One of his imagined devices is the memex:

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.

If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions.

Although that sounds like the PC/work station we have come to know & love, it depends instead on punched cards, calculating machines, valves, microfilm, photo cells. The computer as we know it seems beyond his imaginings at that stage.

The insights are nevertheless breathtaking. The (by no means fatal) limitations of the great library are recognised: it is "nibbled at" by a only the privileged few who have access.

The way in which we write figures causes unnecessary complications: if “we recorded them positionally, simply by the configuration of a set of dots on a card, the automatic reading mechanism would become comparatively simple.” The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical (not electronic) in nature, and they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more.

“There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things.”

The old systems of indexing information made retrieval more difficult than it needed to be; in the new world  selection by association could be mechanized, so that it should be possible to beat the mind in the speed of resurrecting information from storage.

Wholly new forms of encyclopaedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them

But there will be a special class of people to be served in this new world: the users of advanced methods of manipulating data are a very small part of the population. And a mathematician is "not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot … He is primarily an individual who is skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane, and especially he is a man of intuitive judgment in the choice of the manipulative processes he employs." So he will need handmaidens.

For I think that, in his writings at least, for Bush the male did not embrace the female: 'he' most definitely represents a he. I deduce this from the references in the text which are specifically to the female of the species:

• A girl stroked its keys …
• A girl strokes its keys languidly …
• … a whole roomful of girls armed with simple key board punches
• The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear

 Still, it is good to live in the age of the new profession “of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.”

Links
Vannevar Bush: As We May Think
Vannevar Bush: Hypertext
The Man Behind The Scenes Of The Atomic Bomb
Vannevar Bush & Memex: the world’s first web published book
[PDF]Vannevar Bush By Jerome B. Wiesner
The Hedgehog asked the Fox
Related posts
Qwerty 1
Schrodinger’s other life
Bonny babies
Male embrace