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Sixty Years of Memex 101

Posted by timothy from the I-can't-remember-that-far dept.
CubicStar writes "Sixty years ago, Vannnevar Bush published on 'Atlantic Monthly' his seminal article on the Memex, that computer-like device which would provide access to a huge amount of interlinked information. At the time computers were experimental and secret but a visionary (with a shadowy edge) proposed something which even today looks at least influential."
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Sixty Years of Memex More

Sixty Years of Memex

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  • A Google Memex? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by glinden ( 56181 ) * on Tuesday July 19, 2005 @07:28PM (#13109293) Homepage Journal
    Marissa Mayer at Google talks about Google Desktop Search as "the photographic memory of your computer." More details on my weblog post, "Google Memex" [blogspot.com].

    • Re:A Google Memex? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Red Herring ( 47817 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2005 @07:46PM (#13109438)
      The problem with search engines today is that they exactly do not do what Bush was envisioning... they do not record the associations, the context, of the information. What they do well is finding a specific word, or the fact that one page points to another. In many cases, that may help with a task, but it's not the information that Memex was supposed to help with.

      Memex would be like a browser history that is permanent, with the ability to annotate, comment, and add one's own private links between pages. Over time, the pages, documents, emails, and other media would be not linked just by a few hyperlinks or search keywords, but by a much more rich and useful set of associations, and more importantly, contexts. Days/months/years down the road, those contexts could help reconstruct thought patterns, discussions, and other information that is just not saved today in a search engine.

      That is why the Memex was supposed to provide "immortality".
      • He'll build a glass asylum
        With just a hint of mayhem
        He'll build a better whirlpool
        We'll be living from sin, then we can really begin

        Please savior, saviour, show us
        Hear me, I'm graphically yours

        Someone to claim us, someone to follow
        Someone to shame us, some brave Apollo
        Someone to fool us, someone like you...

        We want you Big Brother, Big Brother

        I know you think you're awful square
        But you made everyone and you've been every where
        Lord, I'd take an overdose if you knew what's going down

      • vannevar: /van'@var/, n. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Jeremiah Cornelius ( 137 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2005 @08:13PM (#13109587) Homepage Journal
        A bogus technological prediction or a foredoomed engineering concept, esp. one that fails by implicitly assuming that technologies develop linearly, incrementally, and in isolation from one another when in fact the learning curve tends to be highly nonlinear, revolutions are common, and competition is the rule. The prototype was Vannevar Bush's prediction of 'electronic brains' the size of the Empire State Building with a Niagara-Falls-equivalent cooling system for their tubes and relays, a prediction made at a time when the semiconductor effect had already been demonstrated. Other famous vannevars have included magnetic-bubble memory, LISP machines, videotex, and a paper from the late 1970s that computed a purported ultimate limit on areal density for ICs that was in fact less than the routine densities of 5 years later.
        • But imagine if you stacked up all the servers in the world. I bet it'd be a damned sight bigger than the Empire State building and the cooling requirments would require the power of both Niagara and that Damned Dam out in Nevada/Arizona.

          We're just starting on the path to contextual search. For example, CMF's sometimes take context into account. But they're somewhat primitive.

          Bush was definitely a visionary. He was just born in the wrong time period.

      • Re:A Google Memex? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by RedWizzard ( 192002 )
        Right. The web as it is now is much more like the Memex's database of documents than the entire system. Search engines are also part of the system as you need to be able to find the documents which information on the topic you're interested in. The Memex "trails" could be implemented as personal wikis, allowing linking to interesting pages and adding comments.
        • The Memex "trails" could be implemented as personal wikis, allowing linking to interesting pages and adding comments.

          Try Stumbleupon http://www.stumbleupon.com/ [stumbleupon.com]. It's based around a browser plugin that lets you easily record and comment on sites that interest you. The comments and your preferences are used to categorise the sites you visit, and direct other interested people to the sites. You (and others) can also travel back over your personal trail. There's quite a community developing around it.
      • What your talking about sounds similar to not the world wide web but a semantic web.
      • The problem with search engines today is that they exactly do not do what Bush was envisioning... they do not record the associations, the context, of the informat ion.

        Actually, when you think about it, Google's "Page Rank" technology is a sort of group/aggregate memex calculator.

        PageRank effectively adds up the sum of various peoples' memexes to calculate which pages the most people felt was relevant within their respective memes. (websites) Sort of a "mass-memex" calculator, effectively a public poll o
        • Yes, but when I'm looking for that page on "AJAX stickies" that I saw last week, I want to find the one that I had previously visited, not the one that everyone else was looking at. (This happened to me last night; turns out the one I was looking for was called "webnotes".)

          The other thing that my personal browsing history gives is context. First, it'd be easier to search my smaller corpus of pages I've viewed than all of the web. Second, I might have remembered the approximate date/time that I had last

          • Which reminds me -- I've tried the ScrapBook Firefox extension, but for some reason I didn't seem to "get it". For one, I think all this needs to happen on my "personal server", not on the desktop, since I use several different computers.

            Which brings an interesting idea to mind:

            Squid has an authentication scheme so that it can be used on the wild 'net with reasonable security. It also keeps a log of all requests. (actually, GET, it doesn't log POST as far as I know)

            What if you were to combine these two
            • I've had this idea for a year or so to write a browser as a web app. Sounds really stupid at first, but after a while, you realize that it could be a really great idea. Basically, you can use any web browser to access your proxy page. (See Guardster's free proxy for a simple example.) Your proxy page provides all the normal browser features, so you don't have to worry too much about what your real browser's features. You'd keep all your history and bookmarks centrally located on your server for later access
      • What you could do is to have a device that can read your thought patterns[1] as one of its possible inputs. And possibly send video to your brain via alternative methods[2] as one of its output channels.

        That way you can set up "thought macros" for association with the device's perfect video/audio/photo memory.

        You can also set up "thought macros" in order to control other devices (via that device). A form of virtual telekinesis.

        And also communicate with other people - a form of virtual telepathy.

        One of t
      • The MIT web-consortium has been working on exactly this problem with their proposal called the Semantic Net. Unfortunately, for the masses the world wide was commercially co-opted before Tim had implemented all of his ideas. Now its playing catch-up.

        TEd Nelson's Xanadu Hypertext also addressed these issues. Because he didnt supply opne-source frereware like Tim did, it never caught on.

  • Two words... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Verminator ( 559609 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2005 @07:28PM (#13109295)
    Majestic Twelve.

  • Such a grand vision (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dancpsu ( 822623 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2005 @07:39PM (#13109384) Journal
    And to think that it would be most known for selling used crap on auctions and tons of porn...

  • Interesting article. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ShaniaTwain ( 197446 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2005 @07:42PM (#13109399) Homepage
    Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his record more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursion may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

    ..except thats not exactly how it works is it? we simply add more and more stimuli to fill in the brain capacity that is no longer required for those tasks simplified by databases and search engines. It seems to be human nature, we prefer to operate in a state of constantly being bogged down, or if you prefer, blogged down.

    • Re:Interesting article. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by maxpublic ( 450413 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2005 @09:21PM (#13110002) Homepage
      we simply add more and more stimuli to fill in the brain capacity that is no longer required for those tasks simplified by databases and search engines.

      Perhaps for those under 40, or who don't have children. Old age and rug rats quickly make the quiet life quite appealing, and the ability to throw out unneeded stimuli as good as gold.

      Max

    • Re:Interesting article. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by iabervon ( 1971 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2005 @10:04PM (#13110266) Homepage Journal
      It seems like we've actually been freed of the need to remember things, and now are asked to pay attention to things. This is, of course, much worse for actually getting things done, because it prevents continuous thought and occupies short-term memory, which is very limited rather than long-term memory, which is copious.

      I think that essentially the Peter Principle applies: more demands are placed on us until we are dysfunctional. It takes a certain amount of self-importance to refuse further demands before you're completely bogged down, and further demands are certainly no less available now than they were.

      Of course, there's hope for the situation. The present demands can be managed a lot more effectively than the former demands, because you can just have your phone go to voicemail, turn off automatically checking your email, hide IM, and check all of these things when you've finished a task. It was a lot harder with the technology of 1945 to disregard the need for impractical quantities of reference material on hand for complex tasks.
      • whats interesting is that I find that I planned to go to bed awhile ago, my brain being tired from all the demands I've been putting on it lately, and then I felt the need to catch up on slashdot, the various blogs I read, and other such sites, invariably finding several extremely interesting articles of things that I would love researching if given sufficient time. I've decided to cut this off now after posting this, but the constant stream of learinng reading, investigating and researching is exhilirating

  • What is this article about ? (Score:3, Funny)

    by zymano ( 581466 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2005 @07:42PM (#13109406)
    Anyone want to sum it up for the rest of us ?

    • Re:What is this article about ? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jonathan ( 5011 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2005 @07:50PM (#13109465) Homepage
      It's the classic article on the proto-web from the 1940's. Vannevar Bush, the guy who later was responsible for setting up the National Science Foundation (which funds most non-medical, non-defense related scientific research in the US), describes a future in which scholarly research involving many interlinking documents can be done from the desktop. Although he was thinking of an electro-mechanical rather than a digital system. the Web is pretty much what he was predicting.
    • From the article:

      Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, ``memex'' will do. 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 pr

  • This guy was a serious visionary (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RayDude ( 798709 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2005 @07:43PM (#13109409)
    He predicted talking to machines in 1945. We still ain't there yet. Well, call a baby bell and we're almost there, ALMOST.

    I didn't have time to give the article a full read, but this guy was way, way ahead of his time. He wanted to find ways to store our knowledge. He wanted a scientist to be able to record his words onto paper medium via some devices which had been demonstrated at the world's fair. He even predicted using radio to report from the field and record in his lab.

    I suspect he would appreciate our hard drives, computers, and iPods... Heh.

    I look forward to reading the rest later.

    Raydude
    • Well, from what it looks like, the extensions that he thought of he had already come in contact with through worlds fairs and such. His ideas might have been visionary, but the details of what he thought would make them happen were quite a bit off.
    • They still don't pay much attention to my cuss word sprewing potty mouth but so it goes.
    • Oh, we do talk to machines, all the time - they just don't answer, or even understand us. :) When was the last time you cursed at your computer when it didn't work the way you wanted it to?

      I do that pretty often, myself (and yes, that probably says a lot about my skills with regard to *getting* it to do what I want).
    • He predicted talking to machines in 1945. We still ain't there yet.

      That makes him a visionary? I must be a genius then! I predicted flying bicycles and magic carpet strip clubs years ago and we're still not there yet.

      </sarcasm>Seriously though he has some pretty wild speculation in that essay. I teach a course that deals with the history of information technology and I always assign that essay at the beginning; it blows a few minds (at least, the ones who actually sit through the entire thing).

    • Well, call a baby bell and we're almost there, ALMOST.
      Ah yes, that has to be one of the most heinous advances in technology. I tried phoning ma bell and I couldn't get anywhere ('please restate your question'), I guess it doesn't like my accent or something. They used the same thing at my school too. Here's a bit of help for fellow viticms.
      while(stupid_bot_is_replying){press '0';}

    • I didn't have time to give the article a full read, but this guy was way, way ahead of his time

      He wasn't the only one. What about Paul Otlet? He also contributed to hypertext [everything2.com].

  • It influenced Doug Engelbart... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Traf-O-Data-Hater ( 858971 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2005 @08:05PM (#13109548)
    ...who read the article at the end of WWII whilst stationed in the Philippines http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0035.html [virginia.edu]

  • Bush invented internet (Score:3, Funny)

    by Colonel Panic ( 15235 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2005 @08:11PM (#13109578)
    So apparently it was Bush who invented the internet, not Gore.

  • what about Doug Engelbart?! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 19, 2005 @08:12PM (#13109581)
    (assuming anyone bothers to mod this AC post)

    Doug Engelbart is that guy who invented the mouse, and worked with Alan Kay at Xerox PARC on the subject of using computers to augment human communication and cognition.

    http://www.invisiblerevolution.net/engelbart/ [invisiblerevolution.net]

    Engelbart was largely influenced by Vannevar Bush's 'As We May Think'.

    Of course, if you're a *real* computer scientist, this is all old hat to you!
    • Yeah, it's actually a pretty amazing thing when you think about it........ from the stories, it sounds like Engelbart had come across Bush's article completely by chance. Makes you really wonder how things would have turned out if that never happened, and he never read "As We May Think".

  • He didn't mention pornography once (Score:4, Insightful)

    by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) ( 613870 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2005 @08:18PM (#13109609) Journal
    It's amazing how little some humans appreciate the nature of humans. The fact that people are more likely to store gigabytes of porn on their 'memex' than encyclopedias probably didn't enter the poor little guy's head. Even though he is a human, and probably shares the same desires as the rest of us, he was still completely way off. It's not like there weren't clues. The earliest use of technologies capable of production sexual stimuli are, in fact, the production of sexual stimuli. Whether it's humans carving female figurines 30,000 years ago, or lifelike Renaissance painting and sculpture, early photographic erotica, or pornographic movies from the turn of the century, humans are much the same everywhere.

    • Interestingly in a story about global communications satellites Arthur C. Clarke predicted that one of the prime uses of a communications system that could not be censored by governments would be the transmission of pornography (though he didn't actually call it that).

      Don't remember the story title.

    • Re:He didn't mention pornography once (Score:4, Funny)

      by commodoresloat ( 172735 ) on Wednesday July 20, 2005 @12:08AM (#13110859)
      The fact that people are more likely to store gigabytes of porn on their 'memex' than encyclopedias probably didn't enter the poor little guy's head.

      Not everyone has these priorities, you know. Believe it or not, many people do store encyclopedias, and tons of non-pornographic photos, video, music, etc. on their hard drives. Not everyone stores gigabytes of porn.

      I mean, I do, myself, of course, but I've heard that there are people who don't.

    • It's amazing how little some humans appreciate the nature of humans. The fact that people are more likely to store gigabytes of porn on their 'memex' than encyclopedias probably didn't enter the poor little guy's head.

      So what? Just because he envisioned the use of the memex machines for scientific purposes doesn't mean that the use for porn negates its benefit.

      In fact, it provides the economic benefit of having the idiots who download 6 GB of porn per month help fund a public communication system that
  • I'm just waiting for this to be duped tomorrow.

  • Bush's Views and Modern IP (Score:4, Funny)

    by salesgeek ( 263995 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2005 @08:56PM (#13109838) Homepage
    I wonder what Bush would think of the current state of things, where people try to patent ideas originating durring the second world war? I wonder, too, if better telling the story of the rise of the computer and internet, and the history of software would help people understand just how big the giants are that today's "great innovators" stand on the backs of. I also wonder if people understand in the land rush to make all things some form of property or ther other just how much of their own freedom, and their own ability to express and create they give away.

    And I also wonder how long after the Memex's release it will be before we see Duke Nukem Forever.

  • I want timetravel (Score:4, Interesting)

    by FLAGGR ( 800770 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2005 @10:59PM (#13110559)
    I wish I could go back in time, get a guy like this, sit him down in front of my apple computer, hooked up to a 23" moniter, wireless keyboard and mouse, show him all the drop shadows in osx, open and save some files, and reopen them, to show him it remembered what I wrote. Play some FPS online and call people n00b's over the microphone, load up some solar system simulator, draw a picture in gimp, print it on my photoprinter/copier/scanner, and then let him play with it. Show him instant messaging, then open Firefox and show him the web (not goatse, we need to go slowly, lets say wikipedia)

    After that, I would open up the mac mini, and let him wonder where everthing is stored, how the little hunk of plastic and metal can make that tv its hooked up to do all those things.

    Then, I would take him to the hospital for his heartattack.
    • It can be faced with the most astonishing fact, and within half an hour, have more or less normalized it into its functional reality. Survival doesn't do well when heart attack is the result of every enounter with a funky new beast!

      But I know what you mean.

      Though in my little time-travel-to-show-off-technology fantasy, I travel back in time to 1977 or 1978, shortly after Star Wars came out, and open up a laptop for my childhood friends back then, (who were big Star Wars fans, naturally), and load up one
  • I had to write a short reading response to this article last semester in a "Computer Art" class. Here is a tiny bit about the time period that this was written, as it makes the article all the more interesting (sorry for the any of the usual school bull-shitting):

    "Rather than just praise the article for its miraculous predictions - my margins are full of exclamation marks - one thing that might get overlooked is the historical time period of the essay. 1945 was the end of World War II and as such people

  • "The whole process of linking information across many data sites can be reproduced - and shared with others who can insert it into their own memexes. Bush even imagined products - for instance, sets of sophisticated trails running through databases - that could be purchased and dropped into a memex. He also foresaw the rise of new professionals who, not unlike today's Web designers or writers of data-mining software, "find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the co

  • So ... (Score:1, Redundant)

    by jurt1235 ( 834677 )
    Gore claims he invented/build the internet, and Bush claims he invented the search engine?

  • Python implementation of Memex (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Paul Fernhout ( 109597 ) on Wednesday July 20, 2005 @05:36AM (#13111905) Homepage
    Here is a Python implementation of Memex I wrote, built on top of my Pointrel data repository system.
    It was tested under Debian GNU/Linux and Python 2.3 with TK.

    Download "Pointrel20030812.2 For Py" from here:
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/ [sourceforge.net]
    The implementation is in the included sample file "tkPointrelMemex.py".

    It isn't an exact match (it is a little more general in some ways, including multiple item viewer windows), but it covers the basic functionality of adding text items, making trails of them, and marking indexes on the trails.

    To use the demo, after untarring and so on, type "python tkPointrelMemex.py" and when you get the GUI up, in the "Pointrel Memex Item Viewer" window, select the "Long Bow" trail in the panel beneath the "Update Annotation" button, and then you can use the navigation buttons (first, previous, index, next, last) to move through the trail.

    You can also look at a view of trails in the "Pointrel Memex Trail Viewer" windows.

    There is only one current trail at a time, shown in the Trail Viewer window. To add a new item, edit the text in the top panel in the Item Viewer window and click "Add from edit". The item is now added to the "ALL ITEMS" trail (which is everything in the system), and that "All ITEMS" trail will show up in the list of all trails the item is in near the bottom of the window. Assuming you are the "Long Bow" trail is the current trail indicated in the Trail Viewer window, you can then click on "Add to current trail" in the Item Viewer window and it will be added to the end of the "Long Bow" trail.

    One difference in this program from the real Memex concept Bush describes is that trails are more first class objects in the implementation, whereas in what is described in Memex what he calls trails are more named links and a trail is essentially following identically named links. I think when I first implemented (back around 2001) an issue came up with the Memex description allowing trails to branch in a way that seemed counter to the rest of what he described for trails. Anyway, this implementation is a basis for improvements or changes, at least. It would not be that hard to remove some functionality (making it a single window with two viewers) and change the trail following slightly to be even closer to what he describes.

    For fun, I also included some source code (including for the program itself) for it in the sample archive loaded by Memex on startup, so you can see Memex's (limited) potential to be an IDE with integrated versioning. It would take another button to actually launch the viewed Python code though.

    In theory, it should also be multi-user on a system where the repository has appropriate shared permissions (supported by the underling Pointrel data repository system, and having to manually click on "Reload trails list"), but I have not tested that functionality much.
    • Because that older implementation's GUI is a lttle hard to follow as it consistes of multiple windows, and since it is also less true to the original idea in terms of arbitrary trail building (which could include cycles or other complex webs of segments), I put together this one window version of Memex in Jython (Pyhon on Java): http://pointrel.org/projects/memex/ [pointrel.org]
      That page includes a screenshot and a link to a source file (memex.py) licensed under the GPL. Note: unlike the previous version, this one does no

  • Don't forget H. G. Wells and "World Brain" (Score:3, Informative)

    by dpbsmith ( 263124 ) on Wednesday July 20, 2005 @08:17AM (#13112684) Homepage
    ...and others.

    Wells, perhaps influenced by microfilm technology demonstrations he had seen at Kodak, was writing in 1938 about a world in which "any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica."

    Wells also wrote that "A World Encyclopedia no longer presents itself to a modern imagination as a row of volumes printed and published once for all, but as a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared.... This Encyclopedic organization need not be concentrated now in one place; it might have the form of a network. It would centralize mentally but perhaps not physically..." Of course, he didn't envision anything like goatse... or if he did, he didn't write about it.

    The bibliographer Paul Otlet (1868-1944) also had visions of information-sharing networks.
  • Such machines will have enormous appetites. One of them will take instructions and data from a roomful of girls armed with simple keyboard punches, and will deliver sheets of computed results every few minutes.

    Ahh, the good old days, when men were men and women were girls.

  • From the article:

    "Moreover, it would have been subject to frequent breakdown, so that it could not have been depended upon; for at that time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous."

    The more things change, the more they stay the same.


  • nnnnnnnnkay.....

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