"As We May Think" is part of a tiny genre: a grand vision document that's extremely insightful, and which becomes incredibly influential. It's tempting to say prescient, but the essay actually helped create its imagined future.
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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
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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.
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Satoshi stands out as different, being much more focused on co-ordination problems.
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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.
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Back to Bush: it's fun to see how many ideas still haven't entirely come to fruition. Here he is on sharing entire lines of thought and investigation, a sort of super-
@pinboard or -@pinterest. Keep in mind, this is 1945:pic.twitter.com/WuOg4NYQcZ
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Here's Bush describing so much of the web and wikidom (again: 1945):pic.twitter.com/IWODC7JnPK
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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.
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Anyways, there's much, much more in the article. Well worth reading!
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More fun things: see
@hyfen's project to build a memex: https://hyfen.net/memex/Show this thread -
And
@TrevorFSmith's memex: https://trevor.smith.name/memex/Show this thread -
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.
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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.
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How to manage information overload? What are the real bottlenecks? How can we make vastly better computer note taking systems? Why haven't we gone beyond the file metaphor? How can we build better personal memory systems? Better collective memory systems? So many great problems!
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End of conversation
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