michael_nielsen

In particular, Engelbart, Kay, and @timberners_lee all return to the theme of information overload, in different ways. @timberners_lee's title is "Information Management: A Proposal".

Of course, information overload is intrinsically an insoluble problem. Understanding is so valuable that we will always push ourselves to our limits in managing information, no matter how good our tools become, & feel uncomfortable as we push up against them.

Better tools expand the limits of the information we can manage, but do little to change our desire to go still further, because that desire is only very weakly a function of the quantity of information we can currently manage.

I say information overload is "insoluble", but that's a pessimistic way of framing it. A much better way is that it's an open-ended problem: we can always do better. I won't be surprised if many grand vision documents of the future will also focus on that problem.

It's not clear how many of the authors had ambitions to write influential grand vision documents. Mostly, I think, they were obsessed with important fundamental problems whose time was nearly ripe - so obsessed that they stumbled on some very good ideas, which they then developed

More recurring themes: not just information management, but also memory, note-taking, association of ideas, and problem-solving. None of these problems have yet been solved well, IMO.

Satoshi stands out as different, being much more focused on co-ordination problems.

Another striking difference: all the later vision documents eventually led to working systems, and that was a big part of their success (especially the web and Bitcoin). Bush's vision did not. And yet it was hugely influential anyway.

It's fascinating that he's imagining this all through the lens of analog machines. In fact, Bush never really got into digital computing. It passed him by. But hardware aside, he was thinking about the right problems and at a great level of design abstraction.

Anyways, there's much, much more in the article. Well worth reading!

More fun things: see @hyfen's project to build a memex: https://hyfen.net/memex/ 

And @TrevorFSmith's memex: https://trevor.smith.name/memex/ 

Just a small appendix. Reading back over my thread, it's got too much of the "gee-whiz, wasn't that a clever insight of a giant of the past" trope about it.

Yes, Bush was clever. But that's not so interesting. I think it's more interesting to think about the big, broad fundamental questions he was addressing, and how far we are from really solving them.