“As We May Think”
This 1945 essay in The Atlantic Monthly is eerily prescient of the way the web works today, albeit via microfilm cameras and projectors.
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do. 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. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
Vannevar Bush wrote this piece while director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development—the office which had just successfully completed the Manhattan Project.
Besides its proposal for the “memex” device itself, this essay riveted me because it so cleverly described a fundamental difference between books and our brains. On paper, information is necessarily linear: essentially, it’s an organized listing of facts. But your brain doesn’t store information that way. It’s associative.
That’s why we can find information on Wikipedia (and the web in general) so effectively: it’s organized more like our brains.
