on the memex and the offspring thereof
Post WWII, the world looked like an awfully rosy place. Life was good, consumer goods were plentiful, due to the residual efficiency of wartime. Vannevar Bush, and other scientists coming out of their war mentality, needed to find new uses for their skills, in a much advanced world. Bush espoused, in “As We May Think,” that the postwar consumer culture was beneficial to the citizenry of the world (or at least the United States). He cited improved security, increased control, and a better quality of food and other essentials.
Apparently, though, these improvements were not enough for Bush. Bush strove to improve the way people communicated, organized their thoughts, and worked. He argues that our production of books, periodicals, and newspapers had outstripped our ability to usefully classify and use those same materials. What could be done to recoup the usefulness of these publications? How could researchers (because we know that Bush wasn't talking about house wives) harness the power of the publications they had access to? How could the organization make sense? How could the organization of information (which was, at the time, extremely cumbersome and time consuming) become more streamlined, more intuitive?
Bush proposed the memex, a device that, when described, sounds suspiciously like a jukebox for microfilm. The memex would allow users to catalogue information in ways that made sense to them. They would be able to build “trails” of documents that relate to each other in intuitive ways. There would be no real rationale or logic behind the trails, just whatever organization made sense to the individual user. The memex was to make use of technologies such as microfilm and dry photography, which Bush seemed very keen on.
Having read his essay, I think that Bush would die from delight if he could see what we've made from his ideas (there is absolutely no denying that the people we consider technological visionaries today were influenced by Bush). Bush would have loved digital cameras, since they are the ultimate descendant of dry photography.
He would also, of course, been flattered by innovations such as Sketchpad, Grail, and the Dynabook. After all, the objective of grail, to “interpret the user's intent and respond accordingly” (New Media Reader intro to talk by Alan Kay) sounds very memex inspired, indeed.
Further, I would argue (since I have to argue about something) that the Window, our most beloved tool for the organization of digital worlds, generally attributed to Sketchpad, is a direct descendant of the dual document viewing capabilities of the memex.
Bottom line: Bush was very clever and prescient. His ideas influence us more than most people can imagine. But he seemed suspiciously obsessed with microfilm.