Vannevar Bush was a well-known engineer and scientist who played a huge role with the American government Since World War I. He envisioned a device, known as the Memex that could store and manipulate information; whether it be words or pictures, and be mechanized to work at high speed and flexibility. Through his article As We May Think, he illustrates the Memex as a desk with translucent screens and a keyboard on top (similar to desktop computers we see today). The screen would display stored information with functions of seeing the information displayed on the screen while adding notes/remarks on them and cycling through repeatedly until the user stops. This process can be similar to what we call “blogging” used on the internet today and with other collecting and authoring tools like TikTok or Facebook.
While Bush’s description of the Memex seemed to mimic a huge computer with a monitor, keyboard, and filing cabinets all integrated as one big system, the general physical and computer architecture that we see today “piggybacks” on this visual prototype.
Although monitors, keyboards, and other I/O devices (like the mouse) can be separate parts needed for a computer to work, they can all be part of one device like laptops and tablets in order to browse the internet through the use of search engines and hypertext/hypermedia.
An important feature Bush explains with the Memex is the ability to tie or link documents together but there are also other features like modifying, adding, and recording new information that is necessary with blogging and collection/authoring platforms. Aspects of leaving comments or tapping the “like” button to show interest for someone’s data (text or media) to recording and holding data for retrieval are very common practices computers use today that all trial back to the Memex capabilities.
Really good comparison of Bush’s original vision to technology today! Love the addition of the images as well.
Nicely done. The images do help to relate your text contents with the idea of showing the evolution!
Nicely put into words. I like how you use images to illustrate your points as well as the progression of the internet.