In the year of 1945, Vannevar Bush envisioned a pre-hypertext system or a machine named Memex in his article, As We May Think. Even though the Memex idea might not be so shocking and mind-blowing at the time it came out, it probably highly influenced the Internet and search engines that were invented decades later.
The Memex has many similar features with the Internet. First, the Memex is a system that can store information like images, texts, and data like a library and this information can be accessed immediately. In addition, the searching result won’t be restricted by a specific term or category. And this sounds just like the search engine which we are accessing every day. Memex’s storing and annotating functions were its essential features, but what pushed this idea forward and made it more advanced is the associative trials feature. The associative trials allow the users to create a linear series of images, texts, and other users can leave their comments about these images and texts below them. This feature appears in pretty much all the social media tools we see today, web blog, FaceBook, Instagram, and even Tiktok. There is no doubt that they were developed based on this idea.
It is still hard to believe that someone actually dreamed of a rough sketch of the Internet in the 1940s’. Even though our computers and the Internet did not inherit all the features of Memex, this avant-garde idea is still worth people to look up and study.
I also find it super interesting how Bush was able to create the Memex system many decades ago. It helped create how we use the internet today.
I thought I had a good imagination until learning about the Memex. I feel like tagging (using hashtags) was something I never really understood and also it was something I thought only celebrities did but now I can almost see it as contributing to the different communities that those tags or links belong to.