From Memex To Hypertext

Rating:
Summary: As we may point and click
Review: Vannevar Bush was Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. In theJuly 1945 edition of the Atlantic Monthly, he published a popular science article entitled"As We May Think." Bush discusses a device called a "memex", a sort of workstation with vast optical storage and mechanical information retrieval using associative indexing and "trails". The article is of interest today not only because he happened to get pretty close to how the future finally turned out, but also for the fresh perspective from a time before interactivity itself had been invented. It is also curious to see what he got wrong. Unlike our present day Visionaries, he completely failed to anticipate the introduction of Microsoft Windows on the PC.