Memex
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 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.
- Vannevar Bush; As We May Think; Atlantic Monthly; July 1945.
Vannevar Bush established the U.S. military / university research partnership that later invented the ARPANET, and wrote the first visionary description of the potential use for information technology, inspiring many of the Internet's creators.
Vannevar Bush was born on March 11, 1890, in Everett, Massachusetts. He taught at Tufts University from 1914 to 1917, carried out submarine- detection research for the US Navy, and then joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at the age of twenty-nine. At MIT, Bush worked with a team of researchers to build an automated network analyzer to solve mathematical differential equations, and in the 1930's helped build the first analog computers.
President Roosevelt appointed Bush to Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee in 1940 to help with World War II. In 1941, Bush was appointed Director of the newly created Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), established to coordinate weapons development research. The organization employed more than 6000 scientists by the end of the war, and supervised development of the atom bomb. From 1946 to 1947, he served as chairman of the Joint Research and Development Board.
Bush brought together the U.S. Military and universities with a level of research funding not previously deployed, providing the universities with large, new revenue streams for establishment of laboratories, acquisition of equipment, and the conduct of pure and applied research. In return, the military obtained the advantages of rapidly improving technology.
Thanks in part to Bush's initial setup, the three lead universities in this partnership for several decades were Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Berkeley. Through the influence of projects like SAGEand organizations like the IPTO, the university / military partnership established by Bush naturally laid the foundation for subsequent development of the ARPANET by DARPA.
However, Vannevar Bush's most direct influence on the development of the Internet comes from his visionary description of an information system he called "memex", in an article titled As We May Think published in the Atlantic Monthly in July, 1945, in which he describes the first automated information management system (see excerpt top of this page).
Bush's memex was a breakthrough revelation, an information centric application of electronic technology not previously considered. The vision stamped by memex strongly inspired succeeding generations of scientists and engineers who built the Internet, notably J.C.R. Licklider and Douglas Engelbart. Many leading researchers realized that a memex type system would eventually be built, and worked to help realize it. Only now, more than 50 years later, is Bush's dream becoming fully realized with the development of personal computers, the web, and search engines.
In the private sector, Vannevar Bush was a cofounder of Raytheon, one of the United State's largest defense contractors. He was also president of the Carnegie Institute of Washington research organization from 1939 to 1955.
Resources. The following sites provide additional information on Vannevar Bush.
Bush, Vannevar; Science The Endless Frontier; A Report to the President by Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development; United States Government Printing Office; July, 1945.
Memex and Beyond -- historical and current research in hypermedia inspired by Vannevar Bush's memex vision.
MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium -- 1995.
Book review of "Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer Of The American Century", by G. Pascal Zachary.
Hypertext
Vannevar Bush, the inventor credited with the principles underlying modern hypertext research, was born on March 11, 1890 in Everett, Massachusetts. He was a headstrong child who showed an early aptitude for math. After graduating high school he enrolled at Tufts College in Massachusetts to study engineering. While he was there he came up with his first invention, a land surveying device he called a "profile tracer." The device resembled a lawnmower, and as it was pushed over land it automatically calculated elevations and drew a crude map. The machine never caught on commercially, but it did teach Bush that in order for an invention to become successful, the inventor had to be somewhat of a politician as well.Bush earned his B.S. and M.S. from Tufts in 1913 and worked for the General Electric test department. After briefly teaching mathematics at his alma mater and working for U.S. Navy Inspections, he earned Doctoral degrees in engineering, awarded by both Harvard and MIT. He married and served as an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Tufts until 1919, when he returned to MIT as a professor of electrical power transmission. Through the next decade he stayed at MIT while he worked on submarine detection for the U.S. Navy (during World War I) and created the "network analyzer," a system for setting up miniature versions of large electrical networks. He and his MIT team also developed a prototype of the "differential analyzer," which Bush patented in 1935. The device, which provided solutions to differential equations, was used in World War II to calculate the ballistics table. In 1932, Bush was appointed Vice President of MIT and Dean of the School of Engineering.
In 1938, Bush was elected President of the Carnegie Institution. The position afforded him a highly visible platform for him to help influence the United States' scientific policy and strategy. At that time, the nation was about to enter World War II and was ill-prepared. On June 12, 1940, Bush met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to present his plan for mobilizing military research. He proposed a new organization he called the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC). The President approved the plan and Bush was appointed Chairman of the NDRC while retaining his position at the Carnegie Institution. Soon after the NDRC was subsumed into the newly created Office of Scientific Research and Development. From 1941 to 1947, Bush served as Director of the OSRD.
In 1944, Bush submitted "Science, the Endless Frontier" to President Roosevelt, and the ideas put forth in this proposal lead to the establishment of the National Science Foundation in 1950. At that time Bush was also focused on developing machines for automating human thinking. His idea for a "rapid selector" would store huge amounts of information on microfilm and enable a user to quickly select documents that could then be projected on screenÛit was one of the first attempts by anyone to create a personal information processor.
In 1945, Bush authored the article "As We May Think" in the Atlantic Monthly in which he first proposed his idea of the Memex machine. This machine was designed to help people sort through the enormous amount of published information available throughout the world. His article described a Memex as a "device in which an individual stores 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."
This description, which was written about 30 years before the invention of the personal computer and 50 years before the birth of the public World Wide Web, lays out the notion of the modern link. The Memex was to be a storage and retrieval device using microfilm that would consist of a desk with viewing screens, a keyboard, selection buttons and levers, and microfilm storage. The machine would augment human memory by allowing the user to make links, or "associative trails," between documents. Bush proposed the notion of blocks of text joined by links and introduced the terms links, linkages, trails and Web through his descriptions of a new type of textuality. Bush's article greatly influenced the creators of what we know as "hypertext" and how we use the Internet today. (Ted Nelson coined the term "hypertext" in 1967).
During the course of his inventing career, Bush also created the "Cyclops Camera," which would be worn on the forehead using instantly-developable film; a mathematical calculator, improvements to microfilm, and a "vocoder," or voice-activated typing machine. He served on the boards of several major companies such as AT&T and continued to work with the military, federal government, and educational institutions throughout his lifetime. In 1946, he was appointed Chairman of the Joint Research and Development Board of the War and Navy Departments. From 1947 to 1948, he was Chairman of the Development Board of the National Military Establishment. From 1957 to 1959, Bush served as Chairman of the MIT Corporation, and from 1959 to 1971 he was Honorary Chairman of the MIT Corporation.
Bush was honored with numerous awards including the Louis Edward Levy Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1928, the Holley Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1943, the Roosevelt Memorial Association's Distinguished Service Medal and the Marcellus Hartley Public Welfare Medal of the National Academy of Sciences in 1945, and the Hoover Medal in 1946. In 1948, he was dubbed "Knight Commander of the civilian division of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire." Also that year, President Harry S. Truman presented him with a Medal of Merit. In 1949, President Truman honored him with a Medal of the Industrial Research Institute, and in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson presented Bush with a National Medal of Science. Bush also earned Honorary Degrees from more than a dozen universities, including Johns Hopkins, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Cambridge, and Trinity College. He died on June 30, 1974.
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