In Advance of the Broken Link

Blogging has really drawn me into the Web further than I ever thought I would get. It took my so long (well, 18 or 19 years) to get into books and reading, that I sort of naturally resisted many things Web. Though I was a fairly early user of Prodigy (around 1992 and 1993), and though I've spent the last six years working on a computer as a book compositor, my Internet experience remained basically email and message boards. But lately I've become more curious about this machine I'm spending so much time on. Digging around a little, I found this fascinating story. It seems to be common knowledge to propeller heads and technophiles, as excerpts appear frequently on the Web, but a scientist writing in the wake of the second World War issued a challenge to the scientific community to "turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge" (to quote his editor at The Atlantic Monthly). His name was Vannevar Bush, and his visionary essay was titled "As We May Think."

In his essay, Bush presages much of what now constitutes modern electronic computing in general and the World Wide Web in particular. From the hardware, such as scanning "machines" (which surprisingly already existed) and touch-screen monitors, to the all important technology of hyperlinking. At times Bush is so on the mark (um, unlike a certain other prominent Bush) that the intellectual/imaginative leap his vision must have required is practically transparent and easily overlooked. As when he writes that "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." A memex is basically a computer; here is Bush's definition: "A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility." In fact, Bush goes so far as to call the memex an "intimate supplement to [one's] memory." The emphasis is mine, just because I find that an extraordinary thought. No doubt, we're not quite there yet, virtual sex notwithstanding (though virtual sex seems like a dream of the late eighties that never quite came to fruition, or maybe it has and I missed the cruise ship, after all I seem to be one of the three or four men in the U.S. who hasn't seen the Paris Hilton video—who was in that with her? The Lawnmower Man?).

For anyone reading this who might want more supporting information, but doesn't have time to read the whole essay: the Computing Science department at Simon Fraser University has put up a neat little list of Web-related elements that Vannevar Bush anticipated.