Vannevar Bush's 1945 article described the issues with accessing growing amounts of information and proposed a new machine called Memex to help address this. Memex would allow a user to store books, documents and communications on microfilm and easily retrieve them by clicking between items that were hyperlinked together, mimicking the associative nature of human thought. This visionary concept anticipated key aspects of modern computing such as hypertext, digital libraries and the World Wide Web.

1. ATLANTIC MAGAZINE, JULY 1945
By Vannevar Bush

2.  Introduction
 War effects
 Progress in recording
 Technological Predictions
 Progress in writing
 Associative thinking
 Memex

3.  Growing amount of research
 however, our methods of transmitting and
reviewing the results of research are old
 scientific efforts should make all previous
collected human knowledge more accessible
through machine

4.  Visionary article from 1945
 Intended to set the direction for research in the post-war
period
 Concerned with the problem of finding
information
 Existing technology hopelessly out of date:
▪ The amount of information is being “expanded at a prodigious
rate”, but the means we use to find it is “the same as was used in
the days of square-rigged ships”
 The solution is to get away from hierarchical systems of
organization and adopt new techniques that reflect how
the brain works

5.  Bush had been part of the Manhattan Project,
which produced the atomic bomb
 After the war, he wanted to direct attention
to other possibilities for science

6. Master the Knowledge,
Environment Communication

7.  Acquisition
▪ Instant photography, dictation
 Storage
▪ Unlimited image storage in microfilm
 Calculation / Automation
▪ Fully automatic accounting (point-of-sale, billing)
▪ Electric, fast • Programmable • Data entry job
▪ Symbolic logic + math (à la Mathematica)
 Retrieval
▪ Rapid selection via index (card, film, or magnetic index)
▪ Information workstation: Memex • Hyperlinks

8.  dry photography
- used in facsimile transmission
 microfilm
- The Encyclopedia Britannica could be
reduced to the volume of a matchbox
 tiny camera fitted with universal-focus lens
- move freely and record the worthy

9.  Voder
- emits recognizable speech of stroked key
 Vocoder
- converse of Voder
 Vannevar Bush predict a new machine:
- take dictation
- type it automatically
- talk back if the author wants to review what he
just said

10.  creative aspect of thinking
 involve the entire process by which man profits
by his inheritance of acquired knowledge
 automatic telephone exchange etc.
 the way human mind works
- association
- things are connected by association of
thoughts

11.  “The human mind … operates by
association. With one item in its grasp, it
snaps instantly to the next that is suggested
by the association of thoughts, in accordance
with some intricate web of trails carried by
the cells of the brain… The speed of action,
the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental
pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in
nature.”
Vannevar Bush: As We May Think (1945)

12.  an electromechanical device
 an individual desk with screens, a keyboard,
buttons, levers
 a user can store all his books, records, and
communications as microfilm
 a user could add or remove microfilm reels at
will
 personal computer, online encyclopedias

13.  Consists of a desk containing
– a very large set of documents stored
on microfilm
– screens on which those documents
are projected
– a device for photographing new
documents
– a mechanism for retrieving documents
at the push of a button
– the ability to create links between
documents
– the ability to build trails through
documents, add comments to
documents, insert new documents,
etc.
A “sort of mechanized
private file and library”

14.  Is your head full of little
documents that are all
hyperlinked together?
 I don’t think so !
 Mine certainly isn’t !
 We don’t think in terms
of hyperlinked
?
documents; we think in
terms of concepts, and
associations between
concepts

15. WWW
Berners-Lee Engelbart
Bush
Hypertext
As We May Think AUGMENT
MEMEX
Nelson Xanadu
NLS
 Documents are about subjects
 Those subjects exist as concepts in our brains
 They are connected by a network of associations
 This is how we store knowledge
 Documents are just a representation of some part of
that knowledge

16.  System for storing personal digital media:
documents, images, sounds, and videos
 Four principles of MyLifeBits
 Unique features:
 Interactive Story By Query
 Time interval property

18.  Some of his ideas were wrong like document-
centric information storage
 Led to many new ideas like
▪ TOPIC MAP

19. AS WE MAY THINK