Memex

Last updated
Vannevar Bush Vannevar Bush portrait.jpg
Vannevar Bush

Memex [memory expansion] is a hypothetical electromechanical device for interacting with microform documents and described in Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think". Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which individuals would compress and store all of their books, records, and communications, "mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility". The individual was supposed to use the memex as an automatic personal filing system, making the memex "an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory". [1]

Contents

The concept of the memex influenced the development of early hypertext systems, eventually leading to the creation of the World Wide Web, and personal knowledge base software. [2] The hypothetical implementation depicted by Bush for the purpose of concrete illustration was based upon a document bookmark list of static microfilm pages and lacked a true hypertext system, where parts of pages would have internal structure beyond the common textual format.

Development

An electromechanical memex device

In "As We May Think", Vannevar Bush describes a memex as an electromechanical device enabling individuals to develop and read a large self-contained research library, create and follow associative trails of links and personal annotations, and recall these trails at any time to share them with other researchers. This device would closely mimic the associative processes of the human mind, but it would be gifted with permanent recollection. As Bush writes, "Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race". [3]

The technology used would have been a combination of electromechanical controls and microfilm cameras and readers, all integrated into a large desk. Most of the microfilm library would have been contained within the desk, but the user could add or remove microfilm reels at will. A memex would hypothetically read and write content on these microfilm reels, using electric photocells to read coded symbols recorded next to individual microfilm frames while the reels spun at high speed, stopping on command. The coded symbols would enable the memex to index, search, and link content to create and follow associative trails.

The top of the desk would have slanting translucent screens on which material could be projected for convenient reading. The top of the memex would have a transparent platen. When a longhand note, photograph, memoranda, or other things were placed on the platen, the depression of a lever would cause the item to be photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film.

According to Bush, memex could become "a sort of mechanized private file and library". [4] The memex device as described by Bush "would use microfilm storage, dry photography, and analog computing to give postwar scholars access to a huge, indexed repository of knowledge any section of which could be called up with a few keystrokes." [5]

Associative trails

An associative trail as conceived by Bush would be a way to create a new linear sequence of microfilm frames across any arbitrary sequence of microfilm frames by creating a chained sequence of links in the way just described, along with personal comments and side trails. At the time, Bush saw the current ways of indexing information as limiting and instead proposed a way to store information that was analogous to the mental association of the human brain: storing information with the capability of easy access at a later time using certain cues (in this case, a series of numbers as a code to retrieve data). [6]

Other features

According to Bush, the memex would have features other than linking. The user could record new information on microfilm, by taking photos from paper or from a touch-sensitive translucent screen. A user could "...insert a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. ...Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him." [7] A user could also create a copy of an interesting trail (containing references and personal annotations) and "...pass it to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into the more general trail." [7]

In September 1945, Life magazine published an illustration by Alfred D. Crimi showing the "Memex desk". According to Life magazine, the Memex desk "would instantly bring files and material on an subject to the operator's fingertips". The mechanical core of the desk would also include "a mechanism which automatically photographs longhand notes, pictures and letters, then file them in the desk for future reference." [8]

Extending, storing, and consulting the record of the species

Bush's 1945 "As We May Think" idea for the memex extended far beyond a mechanism that might augment the research of one individual working in isolation. In Bush's idea, the ability to connect, annotate, and share both published works and personal trails would profoundly change the process by which the "world's record" is created and used:

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. ...

The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail that stops only on the salient items and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trailblazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected. — As We May Think

Legacy

Bush said of his "As We May Think" memex device that "technical difficulties of all sorts have been ignored," but that, "also ignored are means as yet unknown which may come any day to accelerate technical progress as violently as did the advent of the thermionic tube." [3] Michael Buckland concluded that Bush's 1945 vision for an information retrieval machine is unhistorically viewed in relation to the subsequent development of electronic computer technology. Buckland studied the historical background of information retrieval in and before 1939 because the Memex was based on Bush's work during 1938–1940 in building a photoelectric microfilm selector, an electronic retrieval technology invented by Emanuel Goldberg for Zeiss Ikon in the 1920s. According to Buckland, the legacy of Bush is twofold: a significant engineering achievement in building a rapid prototype microfilm selector, and "a speculative article" which through "the social prestige of its author, has had an immediate and lasting effect in stimulating others." [9]

The pioneer of human–computer interaction Douglas Engelbart was inspired by Bush's proposal for a co-evolution between humans and machines. [10] In a 1999 publication, Engelbart recollects that reading "As We May Think" in 1945 he "became 'infected' with the idea of building a means to extend and navigate this great pool of human knowledge". [11] Around 1961, Engelbart re-read Bush's article, and from 1962 onward Engelbart developed a series of technical designs. [12] Engelbart updated the Memex microfilm storage desk and thereby arrived at a pioneering vision for a personal computer connected to an electronic visual display and a mouse pointing device. [13] In 1962, Engelbart sent Bush a draft article for comment; Bush never replied. The article was published in 1963 under the title "A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man's Intellect". [14]

Hypertext Editing System (HES) IBM 2250 Display console - Brown University 1969 HypertextEditingSystemConsoleBrownUniv1969.jpg
Hypertext Editing System (HES) IBM 2250 Display console – Brown University 1969

In 1965, J. C. R. Licklider dedicated his book "Libraries of the Future" to Bush. Licklider wrote that he had often heard of the memex and "trails of reference", even before he had read "As We May Think". [15] Also in 1965, Ted Nelson coined the word hypertext in a paper that quoted Bush's memex idea at length. [16] In 1968, Nelson collaborated with Andries van Dam to implement the Hypertext Editing System (HES). [17] In his 1987 book entitled "Literary Machines", Nelson defined hypertext as "non-sequential writing with reader-controlled links". [18] In 2000, Tim Berners-Lee published a statement, acknowledging the influence of hypertext, the work of Engelbart and Bush's "As We May Think" on the development of the World Wide Web. [15] In 2003, Microsoft promoted a life-logging research project under the name MyLifeBits as an attempt to fulfill Bush's memex vision. [19]

1959 Memex II

In 1959, Vannevar Bush described an improved "Memex II". [20] In the manuscript draft of "Memex II" he wrote, "Professional societies will no longer print papers..." and states that individuals will either order sets of papers to come on tape – complete with photographs and diagrams – or download 'facsimiles' by telephone. Each society would maintain a 'master memex' containing all papers, references, tables "intimately interconnected by trails, so that one may follow a detailed matter from paper to paper, going back through the classics, recording criticism in the margins." [21]

1967 Memex revisited

In 1967, Vannevar Bush published a retrospective article entitled "Memex Revisited" [22] in his book Science Is Not Enough. Published 22 years after his initial conception of the Memex, Bush details the various technological advancements that have made his vision a possibility. Specifically, Bush cites photocells, transistors, cathode ray tubes, magnetic and videotape, "high-speed electric circuits", and "miniaturization of solid-state devices" such as the TV and radio. The article claims that magnetic tape would be central to the creation of a modern Memex device. The erasable quality of the tape is of special significance, as this would allow for modification of information stored in the proposed Memex. [22]

In the article, Bush stresses the continued importance of supplementing "how creative men think" and relates that the systems for indexing data are still insufficient and rely too much on linear pathways rather than the association-based system of the human brain. Bush writes that a machine with the "speed and flexibility" of the brain is not attainable, but improvements could be made in regard to the capacity to obtain informational "permanence and clarity". [22]

Bush also relates that, unlike digital technology, Memex would be of no significant aid to business or profitable ventures, and as a consequence, its development would occur only long after the mechanization of libraries and the introduction of what he describes as the specialized "group machine", which would be useful for the sharing of ideas in fields such as medicine. Furthermore, although Bush discusses the compressional ability and rapidity so key to modern machines, he relates that speed will not be an integral part of Memex, stating that a tenth of a second would be an acceptable interval for its data retrieval, rather than the billionths of a second that modern computers are capable of. "For Memex," he writes, "the problem is not swift access, but selective access". Bush states that although the code-reading and potential linking capabilities of the rapid selector would be key to the creation of Memex, there is still an issue of enabling "moderately rapid access to really large memory storage". There is an issue concerning selection, Bush conveys, and despite the fact that improvements have been made in the speed of digital selection, according to Bush, "selection, in the broad sense, is still a stone adze in the hands of the cabinetmaker". Bush goes on to discuss the record-making process and how Memex could incorporate systems of voice-control and user-propagated learning. [22] He proposes a machine that could respond to "simple remarks" as well as build trails [22] based on its user's "habits of association," as Belinda Barnet described them in "The Technical Evolution of Vannevar Bush's Memex." Barnet also makes the distinction between the idea of a constructive Memex and the "permanent trails" described in As We May Think, and attributes Bush's machine learning concepts to Claude Shannon's mechanical mouse and work with "feedback and machine learning". [23]

DARPA Memex Program

Inspired by Bush's hypothetical device in his 1945 article, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched a program named Memex in 2014 to fight human trafficking crimes on the dark web. [24] DARPA later released the Memex artificial intelligence search technologies as open-source software. [25] In 2016, DARPA Memex program received the 2016 Presidential Award for Extraordinary Efforts to Combat Trafficking in Persons for developing the anti-trafficking technology tool. [26] Dozens of law enforcement organizations worldwide use the Memex software to conduct investigations. [27]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Douglas Engelbart</span> American engineer and inventor (1925–2013)

Douglas Carl Engelbart was an American engineer, inventor, and a pioneer in many aspects of computer science. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly while at his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI International, which resulted in creation of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user interfaces. These were demonstrated at The Mother of All Demos in 1968. Engelbart's law, the observation that the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential, is named after him.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hypertext</span> Text with references (links) to other text that the reader can immediately access

Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typically activated by a mouse click, keypress set, or screen touch. Apart from text, the term "hypertext" is also sometimes used to describe tables, images, and other presentational content formats with integrated hyperlinks. Hypertext is one of the key underlying concepts of the World Wide Web, where Web pages are often written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). As implemented on the Web, hypertext enables the easy-to-use publication of information over the Internet.

In computing, a search engine is an information retrieval software system designed to help find information stored on one or more computer systems. Search engines discover, crawl, transform, and store information for retrieval and presentation in response to user queries. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. The most widely used type of search engine is a web search engine, which searches for information on the World Wide Web.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vannevar Bush</span> American electrical engineer and science administrator (1890–1974)

Vannevar Bush was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime military R&D was carried out, including important developments in radar and the initiation and early administration of the Manhattan Project. He emphasized the importance of scientific research to national security and economic well-being, and was chiefly responsible for the movement that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hyperlink</span> Method of referencing visual computer data

In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference to data that the user can follow or be guided to by clicking or tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks. The text that is linked from is known as anchor text. A software system that is used for viewing and creating hypertext is a hypertext system, and to create a hyperlink is to hyperlink. A user following hyperlinks is said to navigate or browse the hypertext.

Project Xanadu was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it superior to the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents."

This article presents a timeline of hypertext technology, including "hypermedia" and related human–computer interaction projects and developments from 1945 on. The term hypertext is credited to the author and philosopher Ted Nelson.

The office of the future is a collection of ideas for redesigning the office. As technology and society have evolved, the definition of the office of the future has changed. Current concepts, dating from the 1940s, are now known as the "paperless office".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Mother of All Demos</span> 1968 computer demonstration by Douglas Engelbart

"The Mother of All Demos" was a landmark computer demonstration of developments by the Augmentation Research Center, given at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, by Douglas Engelbart, on December 9, 1968. The name The Mother of All Demos has been retroactively applied to the demonstration.

<i>What the Dormouse Said</i> Book by John Markoff

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, is a 2005 non-fiction book by John Markoff. The book details the history of the personal computer, closely tying the ideologies of the collaboration-driven, World War II-era defense research community to the embryonic cooperatives and psychedelics use of the American counterculture of the 1960s.

Hyperland is a 50-minute-long documentary film about hypertext and surrounding technologies. It was written by Douglas Adams and produced and directed by Max Whitby for BBC Two in 1990. It stars Douglas Adams as a computer user and Tom Baker, with whom Adams had already worked on Doctor Who, as a personification of a software agent.

A vertical search engine is distinct from a general web search engine, in that it focuses on a specific segment of online content. They are also called specialty or topical search engines. The vertical content area may be based on topicality, media type, or genre of content. Common verticals include shopping, the automotive industry, legal information, medical information, scholarly literature, job search and travel. Examples of vertical search engines include the Library of Congress, Mocavo, Nuroa, Trulia, and Yelp.

Trexy was an London-based Internet metasearch engine established in early 2006. The website was founded by Nigel Hamilton and Megan Hamilton. It allowed users to record and share "search trails" of their activity on search engines. The trails themselves were searchable, allowing users to save time when searching by examining the pages found by other users. A design goal was also to allow easier searching of the "deep web". The service ceased functioning in early 2012.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">As We May Think</span> 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush

"As We May Think" is a 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush which has been described as visionary and influential, anticipating many aspects of information society. It was first published in The Atlantic in July 1945 and republished in an abridged version in September 1945—before and after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bush expresses his concern for the direction of scientific efforts toward destruction, rather than understanding, and explicates a desire for a sort of collective memory machine with his concept of the memex that would make knowledge more accessible, believing that it would help fix these problems. Through this machine, Bush hoped to transform an information explosion into a knowledge explosion.

The Cranfield experiments were a series of experimental studies in information retrieval conducted by Cyril W. Cleverdon at the College of Aeronautics, today known as Cranfield University, in the 1960s to evaluate the efficiency of indexing systems. The experiments were broken into two main phases, neither of which was computerized. The entire collection of abstracts, resulting indexes and results were later distributed in electronic format and were widely used for decades.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emanuel Goldberg</span> Israeli physicist and inventor

Emanuel Goldberg was an Israeli physicist and inventor. He was born in Moscow and moved first to Germany and later to Israel. He described himself as "a chemist by learning, physicist by calling, and a mechanic by birth." He contributed a wide range of theoretic and practical advances relating to light and media and was the founding head of Zeiss Ikon, the famous photographic products company in Dresden, Germany. His inventions include microdots, the Kinamo movie camera, the Contax 35 mm camera, a very early search engine, and equipment for sensitometry.

<i>Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages</i> 2007 book by Alex Wright

Glut: Mastering Information Through The Ages is a 2007 book written by Alex Wright, a writer and information architect for The New York Times. Wright's intention is to provide a broad historical overview of the development of information transmission and organization systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of hypertext</span>

Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Early conceptions of hypertext defined it as text that could be connected by a linking system to a range of other documents that were stored outside that text. In 1934 Belgian bibliographer, Paul Otlet, developed a blueprint for links that telescoped out from hypertext electrically to allow readers to access documents, books, photographs, and so on, stored anywhere in the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ralph R. Shaw</span> American librarian and publisher

Ralph Robert Shaw was a librarian, a publisher, and an innovator in library science. In 1999, American Libraries named him one of the "100 Most Important Leaders We Had in the 20th Century". He was awarded the Melvil Dewey Medal in 1953 and American Library Association Honorary Membership in 1971.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Personal knowledge base</span> Knowledge management software

A personal knowledge base (PKB) is an electronic tool used by an individual to express, capture, and later retrieve personal knowledge. It differs from a traditional database in that it contains subjective material particular to the owner, that others may not agree with nor care about. Importantly, a PKB consists primarily of knowledge, rather than information; in other words, it is not a collection of documents or other sources an individual has encountered, but rather an expression of the distilled knowledge the owner has extracted from those sources or from elsewhere.

References

  1. ↑ Montfort, Nick (2003). The New Media Reader. MIT Press. p. 135. ISBN   9780262232272..
  2. ↑ Davies, Stephen (February 2011). "Still Building The Memex". Communications of the ACM. 54 (2): 80–88. doi:10.1145/1897816.1897840. S2CID   9551946..
  3. 1 2 Bush 1945, Section 8.
  4. ↑ Bush 1945, Section 6.
  5. ↑ Wardrip-Fruin & Montfort 2003, p. 35.
  6. ↑ Kaz, Matt. "Vannevar Bush and Memex". The World Wide Web: the Beginning and Now. University of Michigan..
  7. 1 2 Bush 1945, Section 7.
  8. ↑ Barnet 2013, p. 27.
  9. ↑ Buckland, Michael K. (May 1992). "Emanuel Goldberg, Electronic Document Retrieval, And Vannevar Bush's Memex". Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 43 (4): 284–94. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199205)43:4<284::AID-ASI3>3.0.CO;2-0.
  10. ↑ Barnet 2013, p. 29.
  11. ↑ Barnet 2013, p. 44.
  12. ↑ Barnet 2013, p. 45.
  13. ↑ Barnet 2013, p. 47.
  14. ↑ Barnet 2013, p. 48.
  15. 1 2 Cronin 2006, p. 68.
  16. ↑ Warf, Barney (2018). The SAGE Encyclopedia of the Internet. SAGE. ISBN   9781526450432.
  17. ↑ Cartwright, William; Peterson, Michael P; Gartner, Georg (2013). Multimedia Cartography. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 13. ISBN   9783662037843.
  18. ↑ Cronin 2006, p. 66.
  19. ↑ Cronin 2006, p. 74.
  20. ↑ Cronin 2006, p. 57.
  21. ↑ Nyce, James M.; Kahn, Paul, eds. (1991). From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind's Machine . Academic Press. ISBN   9780125232708..
  22. 1 2 3 4 5 Bush 1967.
  23. ↑ Barnet, Belinda (2008-01-01). "The Technical Evolution of Vannevar Bush's Memex". Digital Humanities. 2 (1).
  24. ↑ "Memex (Archived)". darpa.mil. Retrieved July 8, 2023.
  25. ↑ Brewster, Thomas. "Memex In Action: Watch DARPA Artificial Intelligence Search For Crime On The 'Dark Web'". Forbes. Retrieved 2023-07-08.
  26. ↑ https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-principal-researcher-chris-white-receives-2016-presidential-award/ "Combating Trafficking in Persons: Department of Defense". ctip.defense.gov. Retrieved July 8, 2023.{{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)
  27. ↑ "Artificial intelligence shines light on the dark web". MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2019-05-13. Retrieved 2023-07-08.

Bibliography

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.