michael_nielsen

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.

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!

I wrote about it in 2015: The Memex is not psychologically or sociologically realistic. Though Bush was writing in 1945, his vision seemed Victorian: a facade of proper intellectualism with no grounding in the less dapper side of human nature. One can hardly imagine multimedia…