Vannevar Bush

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext
by Belinda Barnet
Published 14 Jul 2013

‘A Practical View of the Memex: The Career of the Rapid Selector’. In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, edited by James Nyce and Paul Kahn, 135–64. London: Academic Press. Bush, Vannevar. (1933) 1991. ‘The Inscrutable “Thirties”’. In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, edited by James Nyce and Paul Kahn, 67–79. London: Academic Press. . 1939. ‘Mechanization and the Record’. Vannevar Bush Papers. Library of Congress, Box 138, Speech Article Book File. . (1945) 1991. ‘As We May Think’. In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, edited by James Nyce and Paul Kahn, 85–112.

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In Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, 61–77. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nyce, James and Paul Kahn, eds. 1991. From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine. London: Academic Press. Oren, Tim. 1991. ‘Memex: Getting Back on the Trail’. In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, edited by James Nyce and Paul Kahn, 319–38. London: Academic Press. Owens, Larry. 1991. ‘Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer: The Text and Context of an Early Computer’ In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, edited by James Nyce and Paul Kahn, 3–38. London: Academic Press. Pam, Andrew. 1994.

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In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, edited by James Nyce and Paul Kahn, 85–112. London: Academic Press. BIBLIOGRAPHY 151 . (1959) 1991. ‘Memex II’. In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, edited by James Nyce and Paul Kahn, 165–84. London: Academic Press. . (1965) 1991. ‘Science Pauses’. In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, edited by James Nyce and Paul Kahn, 185–96. London: Academic Press. . (1967) 1991. ‘Memex Revisited’. In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, edited by James Nyce and Paul Kahn, 197–216. London: Academic Press. . 1970. Pieces of the Action.

Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything
by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell
Published 15 Feb 2009

Searching only what you have read before or quickly calling up just highlighted passages makes you much more efficient. The tablet PC in the hands of the student of the future will be more than just a container of e-textbooks; really, it will be Vannevar Bush’s memex. Bush intended memex for scientists, but students need memex just as much. They are collecting material, making notes, needing to look things up quickly, and wanting links to the context quotes are taken from. A student memex is a combination of e-textbooks and e-memory. A student’s memex will be accessible from his tablet PC and their cell phone; it will be with him in class, and everywhere he goes. Classes, lectures, and labs are recorded.

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In fact, it specified a system almost made to order for us. That’s pretty amazing, when you consider that it had been written more than fifty years earlier. MEMEX In 1945, when electronic computers were actually multistory buildings, the director of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush, published an essay in the Atlantic Monthly titled “As We May Think,” which outlined a radical new vision of how people might one day keep their own libraries of personal media. He proposed the memex: 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.

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Group projects will be able to build up a collaborative collection of links and notes from individual e-memories that all can tap into to produce the final result. Additionally, a student’s memex will easily integrate his task list, tracking what assignments are completed and which are due next. It can help manage the student’s study habits, for example, pointing out that Johnny spent two hours studying for a history exam worth just 5 percent of the final grade while only spending a half hour on the geography midterm, which is worth 20 percent of the final grade. HIGHER LEARNING It is illuminating to contrast the scientist’s memex envisioned by Vannevar Bush with what is realized by the World Wide Web. Bush expected 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. . . .

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science)
by Thierry Bardini
Published 1 Dec 2000

I: 55-59. Nyce, J. M., and P. Kahn, eds. I99Ia. Prom Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the M,nd's Mach,ne. San Diego: Academic Press. . I99Ib. "A Machine for the Mind: Vannevar Bush's Memex." In Prom Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the MInd's Machine, edIted by J. M. Nyce and P. Kahn, pp. 39-66. San Diego, CalIf.: Academic Press. Oren, T. 1991. "Getting Back on the Trail." In Prom Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the M,nd's Machine, edited by J. M. Nyce and P. Kahn, pp. 3 19- 38. San DIego, Calif.: Academic Press. Owens, L. 199 I. "Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer: The Text and Con- text of an Early Computer."

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Many, however, trace the genealogy of hy- pertext not to Engelbart and his extension of the Sapir- Whorf Hypothesis, but to the work of Vannevar Bush. In a famous article called "As We May Think," Vannevar Bush, who had done some pioneer work in analog computing in the 1920'S and 1930'S while he was a professor at MIT, 2 proposed a new kind of electro-optical device, the Memex, "an enlarged intimate supplement of an individual's memory." The re- sult of "utopian fiction and speculative engineering," the Memex was an imag- inary machine that existed entirely on paper and that never was constructed (Nyce and Kahn 1991b, 45). Bush was very close to the cybernetics project, and accordingly conceived his Memex on the basis of analogies between brain and machine, between electricity and information.

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A good deal of Joe's time, though, seems to be spent with one hand on a keyset and the other using a light pen on the display surface. ('1962, 74-75, emphasis In the original) This conceptualization, in addition to employing two chord keysets, also used two other input devices: the light gun and the tablet. The idea of working di- rectly on twin display surfaces or tablets came from the conjunction of one previous representation of the computer, Vannevar Bush's Memex, with the ancestor of pointing devices, already well diffused in radar technology, the light gun. Engelbart was familiar with both of these devices. And although Bush conceived the Memex as a machine for expediting the individual associ- ation of ideas and Engelbart conceived of his project as furthering their inter- subjective connection, physically, the machines they at first envisioned had a lot in common.

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything
by Steven Levy
Published 2 Feb 1994

This same lingua franca-which we now readily know as digital format-would be put to use in creating original documents, Vannevar Bush said in 1945. And then he described what would later be known as word processing. If this were not remarkable enough, Bush went on to give the design specs for his dream machine, one he called the memex. This "sort of mechanized private file and library" would put to use the vast knowledge stuffed into the aforementioned moving van-allowing the memex user to produce a new document that seamlessly integrated the vast sprawl of the human legacy into a book, letter, audio recording, or causal notation. What does a memex look like? Bush explained: It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which [the user] works.

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At the merest suggestion of a sensible juxtaposition, a user of Atkinson's program could "link" any card to any other. A series of links would result in an information pathway that hearkened back to the dreams of Vannevar Bush, whose influential gedanken experiment, memex, was characterized by the data "trails" that would be cleared by the scientists and researchers using it. As it turns out, Atkinson was not the only one at work on realizing Bush's vision. The memex vision, of course, had originally ignited Douglas Engelbart, who in turn triggered the series of innovations that would lead to Macintosh. But the most vocal proponent of Bush's ideas was Ted Nelson.

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Click on the REVIEWS button and you are linked to a copy of the review laid out graphically as it first appeared; click on the name of the reviewer and you see his or her biographical information. There might even be a RESPONSE button that would yield any letter I wrote commenting upon the review. As Vannevar Bush had hoped for his memex machine, HyperCard was even capable of charting the sorts of connections an individual mentally mapped out all the time. Your own personal web of links could be seen as a fingerprint of your interests. HyperCard, in effect, taught you about your own brain, the leaps of logic and inference it took.

Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing)
by Douglas R. Dechow
Published 2 Jul 2015

Nelson TH (2013) Eulogy for Douglas Engelbart. Speech at Technology legend: honoring Douglas Engelbart, computer history museum, mountain view California, December 9th 2013. http://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​FNCCkhADpiw 12. Smith LC (1991) Memex as an image of potentiality revisited. In: Nyce J, Kahn P (eds) From memex to hypertext: vannevar bush and the mind’s machine. Academic, London, pp 261–286 13. Wolf G (1995) The curse of Xanadu. Wired 3(6). http://​www.​wired.​com/​wired/​archive/​3.​06/​xanadu.​html 14. xeo_at_thermopylae (2004) Comment on a Lambda the ultimate blog post at Wed, 2004-09-01 18:52 http://​lambda-the-ultimate.​org/​node/​233#comment-1729 © The Author(s) 2015 Douglas R.

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We created the articles as hypertext documents using our HyperTies system (www.​cs.​umd.​edu/​hcil/​hyperties). The tilde marks (~) surround phrases that were highlighted selectable links that could be clicked on to jump to the related article. Our research and development were inspired by Vannevar Bush’s 1945 description of Memex, in which links were numeric codes that had to be typed in and by Ted Nelson’s work with Andries Van Dam. Only later did we see Doug Engelbart’s 1968 demo video, which had selectable list items. So while there were several precedents, I take credit for the highlighted textual link embedded in sentences.

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But to make it usable would require technology, real physical earthly nuts-and-bolts practical engineering kinds of technology as well as much structural design work. PS: Electronically storing people’s books, records, and communications was first proposed by Vannevar Bush at MIT in the early 1930s. “As We May Think,” a 1945 essay Bush wrote for Atlantic Monthly, made the idea more generally known. Bush’s concept, Memex, was a sophisticated combination of microfilm and microphotography. It would be years before computer technology caught up with Bush, years before microfilm ceased to be the primary non-paper medium for storing text and images.

Computer: A History of the Information Machine
by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger
Published 29 Jul 2013

The historical context of the World Brain is given in a new edition of Wells’s 1938 classic, edited by Alan Mayne: World Brain: H. G. Wells on the Future of World Education (1995). Historical accounts of Bush’s memex are given in James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn’s edited volume From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine (1991) and Colin Burke’s Information and Secrecy: Vannevar Bush, Ultra, and the Other Memex (1994). The history of the DARPA Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), which effectively created the Internet, is very fully described in Arthur L. Norberg and Judy E. O’Neill’s Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962–1986 (2000) and Alex Roland and Philip Shiman’s Strategic Computing: DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence, 1983–1993 (2002).

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., and Paul Kahn, eds. 1991. From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine. Boston: Academic Press. OECD Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry, Committee for Information, Computer and Communications Policy. 1998. France’s Experience with the Minitel: Lessons for Electronic Commerce over the Internet. Paris: OECD. O’Neill, Judy. 1992. “The Evolution of Interactive Computing Through Time Sharing and Networking.” PhD diss., University of Minnesota. Available from University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, Mich. Owens, Larry. 1986. “Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer: The Text and Context of an Early Computer.”

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He co-founded Microsoft, which developed the MS-DOS and Windows operating systems installed on hundreds of millions of personal computers. Gates, simultaneously portrayed as an archetypal computer nerd and as a ruthless, Rockefeller-style businessman, came to epitomize the entrepreneurs riding the roller-coaster of the information economy. COURTESY OF MICROSOFT. In 1945 Vannevar Bush proposed the “memex,” an information machine to help deal with the postwar information explosion. His concept was an important influence on hypertext and other innovations that eventually led to the World Wide Web. The upper illustration shows the microfilm mechanism which would store vast amounts of information; the lower illustration shows the viewing screens close up.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

There was one thing still missing—Vannevar Bush’s Memex. There were no trails yet on the Internet, no network of intelligent links, no process of tying two items together on the network. The World Wide Web In 1960, a “discombobulated genius” named Ted Nelson came up with the idea of “nonsequential writing,” which he coined “hypertext.”40 Riffing off Vannevar Bush’s notion of “information trails,” Nelson replaced Bush’s reliance on analog devices like levers and microfilm with his own faith in the power of digital technology to make these nonlinear connections. Like Bush, who believed that the trails on his Memex “do not fade,”41 the highly eccentric Nelson saw himself as a “rebel against forgetting.”42 His lifelong quest to create hypertext, which he code-named Xanadu, was indeed a kind of rebellion against forgetfulness.

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“To reach that goal, the full creative and productive energies of the American people must be released.” “As We May Think” reflects this same rather naïve optimism about the economics of the information society. Vannevar Bush insists that everyone—particularly trained professionals like physicians, lawyers, historians, chemists, and a new blogger-style profession he dubbed “trail blazers”—would benefit from the Memex’s automated organization of content. The particularly paradoxical thing about his essay is that while Bush prophesied a radically new technological future, he didn’t imagine that the economics of this information society would be much different from his own.

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There already were technologies from well-funded startups like Lycos, AltaVista, Excite, and Yahoo, vying to build a winner-take-all search engine for navigating the Web. But Brin and Page beat them all to it with an astonishingly original method for determining the relevance and reliability of a Web page’s content. Just as Vannevar Bush’s Memex worked through an intricate system of “trails,” Page and Brin saw the logic of the Web in terms of hyperlinks. By crawling the entire Web and indexing all its pages and links, they turned the Web into what Brin, a National Science Foundation fellow at Stanford, identified as “a big equation.”

The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal
by M. Mitchell Waldrop
Published 14 Apr 2001

Norbert Wiener, I Am a MathematiCian: The Later Life of a Prodigy (Cambndge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1956),112. 2. Vannevar Bush, "The Inscrutable 'Thirties" (1933), in From Memex to f(ypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind's Machine, ed. James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn (San DIego: AcademIC Press, 1991),74. 3. Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think" (1945), in Nyce and Kahn, eds., From Memex to f(ypertext, 89. 4. Qpoted in James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn, "A Machine for the Mind: Vannevar Bush's Memex," In From Memex to Hypertext, 53-54. 5. Bush, "As We May Think," 101-2. 6. Norbert Wiener, "Memorandum on the MechanICal Solution of Partial Differential Equations" NOTES 477 (1940), in Norbert Wiener: Collected Works, ed.

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.: Addison-Wesley, 1975. Burke, Colin. Information and Secrecy: Vannevar Bush, Ultra, and the Other Memex. Metuchen, N.J.: Scare- crow Press, 1994. Bush, Vannevar. "Science: The Endless Frontier." Washington, D.C.: Office of Scientific Research and Development, 1945. -. PIeces of the Action. New York: WIllIam Morrow, 1970. -. "The Inscrutable 'Thirties" (1933). In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the MInd's Ma- chine, edited by James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn. San Diego: AcademIC Press, 1991. -. "As We May Think" (1945). In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind's Machine, edited by James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn.

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Transforming Computer Technology: InformatIOn Processzng and the Pentagon, 1962-1986. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. NRENAISSANCE Committee. Realzzzng the Information Future. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1994. Nyce, James M., and Paul Kahn. "A Machine for the Mind: Vannevar Bush's Memex." In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mznd's Machzne, edited by James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn. San Diego: Academic Press, 1991. Olsen, Kenneth. Oral History. National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Sep- tember 28-29, 1988. O'Neill, Judy E. "The Evolution of Interactive Computing Through Time-Shanng and Networking."

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
by John Markoff
Published 1 Jan 2005

This interview is the clearest and most comprehensive account of Engelbart’s career, and I have relied on it extensively. 2.Ibid. 3.Ibid. 4.There is some confusion on this point. At various times Engelbart has said that he found the original article in the library and at other times he has said he believed he first read the Life account of Vannevar Bush’s Memex. Whatever the case, it had a defining impact on him. 5.Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1945. 6.Lowood and Adams, oral history. 7.Ibid. Twenty years later, a young Steve Wozniak, then a brand-new HP engineer, would ask the company if they wanted to sell a personal computer. HP said it wasn’t interested, and Wozniak went off to cofound Apple Computer.

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He would create a workstation for organizing all of the information and communications needed for any given project. In his mind, he saw streams of characters moving on the display. Although nothing of the sort existed, it seemed the engineering should be easy to do and that the machine could be harnessed with levers, knobs, or switches. It was nothing less than Vannevar Bush’s Memex, translated into the world of electronic computing. In order to create such a machine, he realized that he would need to learn more about computing, which led him to think again about the William James essay he had read in the Philippines. Every project has a first step, he remembered. And the first step in this case was to write to graduate schools.

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In 1959, the four men and their families accordingly started Ridge Vineyards, which ultimately became one of America’s most respected small wineries. In the magnetics group, English also met Engelbart, and it didn’t take long before he learned about the quiet engineer’s passion for building a working version of Vannevar Bush’s Memex machine. It was generally understood around the lab that Engelbart was simply putting in time at SRI in order to help pay the bills, as his real interest lay in building digital computers. Initially, the idea failed to captivate English. It was still very much an analog world, and he quickly learned that Engelbart was an inveterate dreamer.

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by Walter Isaacson
Published 6 Oct 2014

Sources for Vannevar Bush include Vannevar Bush, Pieces of the Action (Morrow, 1970); Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (MIT, 1999); “Yankee Scientist,” Time cover story, Apr. 3, 1944; Jerome Weisner, “Vannevar Bush: A Biographical Memoir,” National Academy of Sciences, 1979; James Nyce and Paul Kahn, editors, From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine (Academic Press, 1992); Jennet Conant, Tuxedo Park (Simon & Schuster, 2002); Vannevar Bush oral history, American Institute of Physics, 1964. 2. Weisner, “Vannevar Bush.” 3. Zachary, Endless Frontier, 23. 4.

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CHAPTER EIGHT THE PERSONAL COMPUTER “AS WE MAY THINK” The idea of a personal computer, one that ordinary individuals could get their hands on and take home, was envisioned in 1945 by Vannevar Bush. After building his big analog computer at MIT and helping to create the military-industrial-academic triangle, he wrote an essay for the July 1945 issue of the Atlantic titled “As We May Think.”271 In it he conjured up the possibility of a personal machine, which he dubbed a memex, that would store and retrieve a person’s words, pictures, and other information: “Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. . . . 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.

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” But the ship kept sailing, “right out into the fog, into the seasickness,” on to Leyte Gulf in the Philippines.23 On Leyte Island, Engelbart secluded himself whenever possible in a Red Cross library in a thatched hut on stilts, and there he became enthralled by a heavily illustrated Life magazine reprint of Vannevar Bush’s Atlantic article “As We May Think,” the one that envisioned the memex personal information system.24 “The whole concept of helping people work and think that way just excited me,” he recalled.25 After his Navy service, he got an engineering degree from Oregon State and then worked at the forerunner to NASA at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine
by Peter Lunenfeld
Published 31 Mar 2011

From the pulpy imaginations of comics worldwide, the twentieth century saw the realizations of fantasies from British boy-hero Dan Dare’s rocket ships, to daily newspaper strip Dick Tracy’s twoway wrist communicators, to the sonic booms over Tokyo of Kazumasa Hirai and Jiro Kuwata’s pioneering cyborg manga, 8 Man. Even the relatively sober prognostications of engineers discussed in the “Generations” narrative came true in the most widespread ways. By 2000, neither Vannevar Bush’s proto-hypertextual Memex proposal of 1945 nor J.C.R. Licklider’s more amusingly named Intergalactic Computer Network in 1963 seemed futuristic. In fact, they defined the presentness of desktops worldwide. It may be that we will never catch our collective breath, but that does not mean that the yearning for more comprehensive visions of the future has completely lost its value.

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But there were a few key people during the conflict who saw that the powers of computing, if spread wider than the laboratory and the war room, would be a huge benefit to humanity. By moving toward the goal of participation and melding it to simulation, they were able to shift the focus from the “what” back to the “who” again. These were the Patriarchs. The Patriarchs: Vannevar Bush and J.C.R. Licklider The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it. —Vannevar Bush People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and underestimate what can be done in five to ten years. —J.C.R. Licklider 147 GENERATIONS There are many mathematicians, early computer scientists, and engineers who deserve to be considered part of the first generation of pioneering Patriarchs.

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Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology (1985; repr., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); available at <http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/>. 3. See Vannevar Bush, Science: The Endless Frontier (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1945). 4. For an analysis of this transformation, see Paul N. Edwards, Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 5. G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 6. “The human mind . . . operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age
by Alex Wright
Published 6 Jun 2014

The Web’s architecture—flat, open, and highly distributed—stems not only from its ­adherence to a particular set of technical protocols rooted in the U.S. military establishment, but from a particular strain of thought about the structure of hypertext systems that emerged in the Anglo-American computer world in the years after World War II. Most contemporary accounts of Web history trace its conceptual origins to a 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush entitled “As We May Think.” First published in the Atlantic Monthly and later in Life magazine, the essay describes a fictional machine called the Memex, consisting of a single desk with two screens and microfilm storage, providing access to a vast collection of stored documents.10 Published fourteen years after Emanuel Goldberg first unveiled his Statistical Machine, the Memex drew on Bush’s earlier experiments working with microfilm-reading machines in the 1930s.11 Bush envisioned his new proposed device as far more than a microfilm reader, however.

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Wells was also familiar with the work of another conference attendee, Watson Davis, the American information scientist who created an early microfilm-based syndication service for scientific articles, an endeavor that he hoped might pave the way for a constantly updated “World Bibliography of Scientific Literature” to be distributed on microfilm; he later established the professional association that became the American Society for Information ­Science and Technology. There is no clear evidence that Wells’s writing influenced Vannevar Bush, who was working on his own ideas for an information storage and retrieval device that he ultimately dubbed the Memex— widely cited as the direct conceptual forebear of the World Wide Web. Scholar Michael Buckland has observed that Bush was notoriously stingy when it came to citing others’ work: his landmark essay “As We May Think” contains a notable lack of citations to the work of any of the well-known people who had previously voiced similar ideas: Ostwald, Otlet, Davis, or James Bryce at IBM, who had 217 C ATA L O G I N G T H E WO R L D r­ eceived several patents for notably similar concepts.23 Connecting Otlet, Wells, Goldberg, and Bush offers tempting lessons, as well as trajectory that takes technology from being put in the service of peace to that of war, particularly given Bush’s activities during World War II and the uses to which Goldberg’s invention were put.

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., 100–105. Ibid., 113. Wells, as quoted in Rayward, “March of the Modern and the Reconstitution of the World’s Knowledge Apparatus,” 229. Rayward, Universe of Information, 357. Buckland, Emanuel Goldberg and His Knowledge Machine, 222. Buckland, “Emanuel Goldberg, Electronic Document Retrieval, and Vannevar Bush’s Memex.” Wells, World Brain, 86–87. Teilhard de Chardin, “Hominization” in The Vision of the Past. Borges, “Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” Ibid. Otlet, “Science of Bibliography,” 72–73. Eco, Search for the Perfect Language, 259. Chapter 10 1. A now-defunct classification; jellyfish are now considered part of the phylum Cnidaria. 2.

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing
by Ed Finn
Published 10 Mar 2017

Augmenting Imagination Whatever imagination is, we know that the focal lenses of our tools inflect and change it. Consider Vannevar Bush’s seminal vision of the Memex, an early version of the digital Star Trek computer inspired by a conception of imaginative augmentation. It was a universal knowledge machine, to be sure, but with the size and function of a personal desk: “It is an enlarged intimate supplement to … memory.”9 Bush first struck the chord that continues to haunt Google, Apple, and the algorithmic vanguard today: the encyclopedia must also be intimate. Computers must make the universal not just accessible but personal. The chief function of the Memex would be to assist users in constructing and reviewing “trails,” or hypertextual associations between documents that constituted a personal paratextual layer, a set of maps for the wilderness of microfilm inhabiting one’s desk.

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Figure 4.6: An engraving of the Turk from Karl Gottlieb von Windisch’s 1784 book Inanimate Reason. Figure 5.1: The Blockchain, a system for transparent, public accounting of Bitcoin transactions. Creative Commons: Matthaus Wander; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bitcoin_Block_Data.png. Figure 6.1: Vannevar Bush’s Memex. Creative Commons: http://2014.hackinghistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/wpid14-wpid-Bush-Memex-lg1.jpg. Index Abortion, 64 Abstraction, 10 aesthetics and, 83, 87–112 arbitrage and, 161 Bogost and, 49, 92–95 capitalism and, 165 context and, 24 cryptocurrency and, 160–180 culture machines and, 54 (see also Culture machines) cybernetics and, 28, 30, 34 desire for answer and, 25 discarded information and, 50 effective computability and, 28, 33 ethos of information and, 159 high frequency trading (HFT) and imagination and, 185, 189, 192, 194 interfaces and, 52, 54, 92, 96, 103, 108, 110–111 ladder of, 82–83 language and, 2, 24 Marxism and, 165 meaning and, 36 money and, 153, 159, 161, 165–167, 171–175 Netflix and, 87–112, 205n36 politics of, 45 pragmatist approach and, 19–21 process and, 2, 52, 54 reality and, 205n36 Siri and, 64–65, 82–84 Turing Machine and, 23 (see also Turing Machine) Uber and, 124–126, 129 Wiener and, 28–29, 30 work of algorithms and, 113, 120, 123–136, 139–149 Adams, Douglas, 123 Adams, Henry, 80–81 Adaptive systems, 50, 63, 72, 92, 174, 176, 186, 191 Addiction, 114–115, 118–119, 121–122, 176 AdSense, 158–159 Advent of the Algorithm, The (Berlinski), 9, 24 Advertisements AdSense and, 158–159 algorithmic arbitrage and, 111, 161 Apple and, 65 cultural calculus of waiting and, 34 as cultural latency, 159 emotional appeals of, 148 Facebook and, 113–114 feedback systems and, 145–148 Google and, 66, 74, 156, 158–160 Habermas on, 175 Netflix and, 98, 100, 102, 104, 107–110 Uber and, 125 Aesthetics abstraction and, 83, 87–112 arbitrage and, 109–112, 175 culture machines and, 55 House of Cards and, 92, 98–112 Netflix Quantum Theory and, 91–97 personalization and, 11, 97–103 of production, 12 work of algorithms and, 123, 129, 131, 138–147 Agre, Philip, 178–179 Airbnb, 124, 127 Algebra, 17 Algorithmic reading, 52–56 Algorithmic trading, 12, 20, 99, 155 Algorithms abstraction and, 2 (see also Abstraction) arbitrage and, 12, 51, 97, 110–112, 119, 121, 124, 127, 130–134, 140, 151, 160, 162, 169, 171, 176 Berlinski on, 9, 24, 30, 36, 181 Bitcoin and, 160–180 black boxes and, 7, 15–16, 47–48, 51, 55, 64, 72, 92–93, 96, 136, 138, 146–147, 153, 162, 169–171, 179 blockchains and, 163–168, 171, 177, 179 Bogost and, 16, 33, 49 Church-Turing thesis and, 23–26, 39–41, 73 consciousness and, 2, 4, 8, 22–23, 36–37, 40, 76–79, 154, 176, 178, 182, 184 DARPA and, 11, 57–58, 87 desire and, 21–26, 37, 41, 47, 49, 52, 79–82, 93–96, 121, 159, 189–192 effective computability and, 10, 13, 21–29, 33–37, 40–49, 52–54, 58, 62, 64, 72–76, 81, 93, 192–193 Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm and, 163 embodiment and, 26–32 encryption, 153, 162–163 enframing and, 118–119 Enlightenment and, 27, 30, 38, 45, 68–71, 73 experimental humanities and, 192–196 Facebook and, 20 (see also Facebook) faith and, 7–9, 12, 16, 78, 80, 152, 162, 166, 168 gamification and, 12, 114–116, 120, 123–127, 133 ghost in the machine and, 55, 95 halting states and, 41–46 high frequency trading (HFT) and, 151–158, 168–169, 177 how to think about, 36–41 ideology and, 7, 9, 18, 20–23, 26, 33, 38, 42, 46–47, 54, 64, 69, 130, 144, 155, 160–162, 167, 169, 194 imagination and, 11, 55–56, 181–196 implementation and, 47–52 intelligent assistants and, 11, 57, 62, 64–65, 77 intimacy and, 4, 11, 35, 54, 65, 74–78, 82–85, 97, 102, 107, 128–130, 172, 176, 185–189 Knuth and, 17–18 language and, 24–28, 33–41, 44, 51, 54–55 machine learning and, 2, 15, 28, 42, 62, 66, 71, 85, 90, 112, 181–184, 191 mathematical logic and, 2 meaning and, 35–36, 38, 44–45, 50, 54–55 metaphor and, 32–36 Netflix Prize and, 87–91 neural networks and, 28, 31, 39, 182–183, 185 one-way functions and, 162–163 pragmatist approach and, 18–25, 42, 58, 62 process and, 41–46 programmable culture and, 169–175 quest for perfect knowledge and, 13, 65, 71, 73, 190 rise of culture machines and, 15–21 (see also Culture machines) Siri and, 59 (see also Siri) traveling salesman problem and Turing Machine and, 9 (see also Turing Machine) as vehicle of computation, 5 wants of, 81–85 Weizenbaum and, 33–40 work of, 113–149 worship of, 192 Al-Khwārizmī, Abū ‘Abdullāh Muhammad ibn Mūsā, 17 Alphabet Corporation, 66, 155 AlphaGo, 182, 191 Amazon algorithmic arbitrage and, 124 artificial intelligence (AI) and, 135–145 Bezos and, 174 Bitcoin and, 169 business model of, 20–21, 93–94 cloud warehouses and, 131–132, 135–145 disruptive technologies and, 124 effective computability and, 42 efficiency algorithms and, 134 interface economy and, 124 Kindle and, 195 Kiva Systems and, 134 Mechanical Turk and, 135–145 personalization and, 97 physical logistics of, 13, 131 pickers and, 132–134 pragmatic approach and, 18 product improvement and, 42 robotics and, 134 simplification ethos and, 97 worker conditions and, 132–134, 139–140 Android, 59 Anonymous, 112, 186 AOL, 75 Apple, 81 augmenting imagination and, 186 black box of, 169 cloud warehouse of, 131 company value of, 158 effective computability and, 42 efficiency algorithms and, 134 Foxconn and, 133–134 global computation infrastructure of, 131 iOS App Store and, 59{tab} iTunes and, 161 massive infrastructure of, 131 ontology and, 62–63, 65 physical logistics of, 131 pragmatist approach and, 18 product improvement and, 42 programmable culture and, 169 search and, 87 Siri and, 57 (see also Siri) software and, 59, 62 SRI International and, 57, 59 Application Program Interfaces (APIs), 7, 113 Apps culture machines and, 15 Facebook and, 9, 113–115, 149 Her and, 83 identity and, 6 interfaces and, 8, 124, 145 iOS App Store and, 59 Lyft and, 128, 145 Netflix and, 91, 94, 102 third-party, 114–115 Uber and, 124, 145 Arab Spring, 111, 186 Arbesman, Samuel, 188–189 Arbitrage algorithmic, 12, 51, 97, 110–112, 119, 121, 124, 127, 130–134, 140, 151, 160, 162, 169, 171, 176 Bitcoin and, 51, 169–171, 175–179 cultural, 12, 94, 121, 134, 152, 159 differing values and, 121–122 Facebook and, 111 Google and, 111 high frequency trading (HFT) and, 151–158, 168–169, 177 interface economy and, 123–131, 139–140, 145, 147 labor and, 97, 112, 123–145 market issues and, 152, 161 mining value and, 176–177 money and, 151–152, 155–163, 169–171, 175–179 Netflix and, 94, 97, 109–112 PageRank and, 159 pricing, 12 real-time, 12 trumping content and, 13 valuing culture and, 155–160 Archimedes, 18 Artificial intelligence (AI) adaptive systems and, 50, 63, 72, 92, 174, 176, 186, 191 Amazon and, 135–145 anthropomorphism and, 83, 181 anticipation and, 73–74 artificial, 135–141 automata and, 135–138 DARPA and, 11, 57–58, 87 Deep Blue and, 135–138 DeepMind and, 28, 66, 181–182 desire and, 79–82 ELIZA and, 34 ghost in the machine and, 55, 95 HAL and, 181 homeostat and, 199n42 human brain and, 29 intellectual history of, 61 intelligent assistants and, 11, 57, 62, 64–65, 77 intimacy and, 75–76 job elimination and, 133 McCulloch-Pitts Neuron and, 28, 39 machine learning and, 2, 15, 28, 42, 62, 66, 71, 85, 90, 112, 181–186 Mechanical Turk and, 12, 135–145 natural language processing (NLP) and, 62–63 neural networks and, 28, 31, 39, 182–183, 185 OS One (Her) and, 77 renegade independent, 191 Samantha (Her) and, 77–85, 154, 181 Siri and, 57, 61 (see also Siri) Turing test and, 43, 79–82, 87, 138, 142, 182 Art of Computer Programming, The (Knuth), 17 Ashby, Ross, 199n42 Asimov, Isaac, 45 Atlantic, The (magazine), 7, 92, 170 Automation, 122, 134, 144, 188 Autopoiesis, 28–30 Babbage, Charles, 8 Banks, Iain, 191 Barnet, Belinda, 43–44 Bayesian analysis, 182 BBC, 170 BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos (Netflix), 89–90 Berlinski, David, 9, 24, 30, 36, 181, 184 Bezos, Jeff, 174 Big data, 11, 15–16, 62–63, 90, 110 Biology, 2, 4, 26–33, 36–37, 80, 133, 139, 185 Bitcoin, 12–13 arbitrage and, 51, 169–171, 175–179 blockchains and, 163–168, 171–172, 177, 179 computationalist approach and cultural processing and, 178 eliminating vulnerability and, 161–162 Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm and, 163 encryption and, 162–163 as glass box, 162 intrinsic value and, 165 labor and, 164, 178 legitimacy and, 178 market issues and, 163–180 miners and, 164–168, 171–172, 175–179 Nakamoto and, 161–162, 165–167 one-way functions and, 162–163 programmable culture and, 169–175 transaction fees and, 164–165 transparency and, 160–164, 168, 171, 177–178 trust and, 166–168 Blockbuster, 99 Blockchains, 163–168, 171–172, 177, 179 Blogs early web curation and, 156 Facebook algorithms and, 178 Gawker Media and, 170–175 journalistic principles and, 173, 175 mining value and, 175, 178 Netflix and, 91–92 turker job conditions and, 139 Uber and, 130 Bloom, Harold, 175 Bogost, Ian abstraction and, 92–95 algorithms and, 16, 33, 49 cathedral of computation and, 6–8, 27, 33, 49, 51 computation and, 6–10, 16 Cow Clicker and, 12, 116–123 Enlightenment and, 8 gamification and, 12, 114–116, 120, 123–127, 133 Netflix and, 92–95 Boolean conjunctions, 51 Bosker, Bianca, 58 Bostrom, Nick, 45 Bowker, Geoffrey, 28, 110 Boxley Abbey, 137 Brain Pickings (Popova), 175 Brain plasticity, 38, 191 Brand, Stewart, 3, 29 Brazil (film), 142 Breaking Bad (TV series), 101 Brin, Sergei, 57, 155–156 Buffett, Warren, 174 Burr, Raymond, 95 Bush, Vannevar, 18, 186–189, 195 Business models Amazon and, 20–21, 93–94, 96 cryptocurrency and, 160–180 Facebook and, 20 FarmVille and, 115 Google and, 20–21, 71–72, 93–94, 96, 155, 159 Netflix and, 87–88 Uber and, 54, 93–94, 96 Business of Enlightenment, The (Darnton) 68, 68 Calculus, 24, 26, 30, 34, 44–45, 98, 148, 186 CALO, 57–58, 63, 65, 67, 79, 81 Campbell, Joseph, 94 Campbell, Murray, 138 Capitalism, 12, 105 cryptocurrency and, 160, 165–168, 170–175 faking it and, 146–147 Gawker Media and, 170–175 identity and, 146–147 interface economy and, 127, 133 labor and, 165 public sphere and, 172–173 venture, 9, 124, 174 Captology, 113 Carr, Nicholas, 38 Carruth, Allison, 131 Castronova, Edward, 121 Cathedral and the Bazaar, The (Raymond), 6 Cathedral of computation, 6–10, 27, 33, 49, 51 Chess, 135–138, 144–145 Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, 3, 16, 33, 35–36, 42, 104 Church, Alonzo, 23– 24, 42 Church-Turing thesis, 23–26, 39–41 Cinematch (Netflix), 88–90, 95 Citizens United case, 174 Clark, Andy, 37, 39–40 Cloud warehouses Amazon and, 135–145 interface economy and, 131–145 Mechanical Turk and, 135–145 worker conditions and, 132–134, 139–140 CNN, 170 Code.

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Figure 4.4 Lyft advertising takes a very different tack from Uber. Figure 4.5 Amazon Mechanical Turk Interface for Managing Workers. Figure 4.6 An engraving of the Turk from Karl Gottlieb von Windisch’s 1784 book Inanimate Reason. Figure 5.1 The blockchain, a system for transparent, public accounting of Bitcoin transactions. Figure 6.1 Vannevar Bush’s Memex. Acknowledgments This book owes its existence to the generosity and support of many people and institutions. I count myself very lucky to have the support of my academic home, Arizona State University, in a tremendous range of large and small ways. Thanks go to President Michael Crow, for hiring me and making my unique position possible, and to the many university leaders who continue to support our strange experiment in imagination.

Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 27 Aug 2007

Mitchell Waldrop, The Future of Computing (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center, 2004). 2. David Alan Grier, When Computers Were Human (Princeton University Press, 2005). 3. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” in From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, edited by James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn (San Diego: Academic Press, 1991), p. 89. 4. Larry Owens, “Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer: The Text and Context of an Early Computer,” in From Memex to Hypertext, edited by Nyce and Kahn, pp. 23–24. 5. Brian Randell, “The COLOSSUS,” in A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century, edited by N. Metropolis, J.

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But they were also motivated by a tantalizing glimpse of empowerment: a realization that massive number crunching could open up whole new vistas for engineering, business, and science. A classic example is Vannevar Bush, who orchestrated the Manhattan Project and all the rest of nation’s war-related scientific research during World War II. Bush is probably best known today for his 1945 article about the “memex,” a hypothetical knowledge-access tool that could link one concept to the next in a manner that anticipated the World Wide Web by nearly half a century.3 But he had actually been led to computing starting in the early 1920s, when he was an MIT electrical engineering professor grappling with one of the most vexing technical problems of the day: the instability of electric power networks.4 The equations that described such a network were straightforward in principle but horrendous in practice, and all but impossible to solve by hand.

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There was the notion of interactive comput- 2990-7 ch11 waldrop 7/23/07 12:13 PM innovation and adaptation Page 125 125 ing, for example, in which a computer would respond to the user’s input immediately (as opposed to generating a stack of fanfold printout hours later); this idea dated back to the Whirlwind project, an experiment in real-time computing that began at MIT in the 1940s.13 There were the twin notions of individually controlled computing (having a computer apparently under the control of a single user) and home computing (having a computer in your own house); both emerged in the 1960s from MIT’s Project MAC, an early experiment in time-sharing.14 And then there was the notion of a computer as an open system, meaning that a user could modify it, add to it, and upgrade it however he or she wanted; that practice was already standard in the minicomputer market, which was pioneered by the Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1960s.15 —The Internet as we know it today represents the convergence of (among other ideas) the notion of packet-switched networking from the 1960s;16 the notion of internetworking (as embodied in the TCP/IP protocol), which was developed in the 1970s to allow packets to pass between different networks;17 and the notion of hypertext—which, of course, goes back to Vannevar Bush’s article on the memex in 1945. 2990-7 ch11 waldrop 7/23/07 12:13 PM Page 126 2990-7 ch12 kurth 7/23/07 12:14 PM Page 127 Part IV What Could Be 2990-7 ch12 kurth 7/23/07 12:14 PM Page 128 2990-7 ch12 kurth 7/23/07 12:14 PM Page 129 12 Cassandra versus Pollyanna A Debate between James Kurth and Gregg Easterbrook James Kurth: I am an optimist about the current pessimism, but a pessimist overall.

Distrust That Particular Flavor
by William Gibson
Published 3 Jan 2012

This is the sort of thing that science fiction, traditionally, is neither good at predicting, nor, should we predict it, at describing. Vannevar Bush, whom I mentioned earlier, was not a science-fiction writer. In World War II he was chief scientific adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, and director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, where he supervised the work that led to the creation of the atomic bomb. He more or less invented the military-industrial complex, as we call it today. In 1945, he published an article in The Atlantic Monthly titled, “As We May Think.” In this article he imagined a system he called the “memex,” short for “memory extender.” If there was a more eerily prescient piece of prose, fiction or otherwise, written in the first half the twentieth century, I don’t know it.

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What you wouldn’t do, in 1940, with an electronic brain, would be to stick it on your desk, connect it somehow to a typewriter, and, if you, had one, a television of the sort demonstrated at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. At which point it would start to resemble…. But it’s not Steam Engine Time yet, so you can’t do that. Although you would, or anyway you’d think about it, if you were a man named Vannevar Bush, but we’ll come back to him later. Vannevar Bush almost single-handedly invented what we now think of as the military-industrial complex. He did that for Franklin Roosevelt, but it isn’t what he’ll be remembered for. I can’t remember a robot ever scaring me that much, after Dr. Satan’s robots. They continued to be part of the cultural baggage of sci-fi, but generally seemed rather neutral, at least to me.

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If there was a more eerily prescient piece of prose, fiction or otherwise, written in the first half the twentieth century, I don’t know it. This article is remembered most often, today, for having first envisioned what we call the principle of “hyperlinking,” a means of connecting disparate but conceptually involved units of data. But I’ve never read it that way, myself. I think Vannevar Bush envisioned the cyborg, in the sense I’ve been suggesting we most valuably use that word. One remarkable thing about this is that he seemed to have no particular idea that electronics would have anything to do with it. He begins by imagining an engineer, a technocrat figure, equipped with a “walnut-sized” (his phrase) camera, which is strapped to the center of his forehead, its shutter operated by a handheld remote.

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future
by James Bridle
Published 18 Jun 2018

The war unleashed vast amounts of funding for research, and a sense of urgency for its application, but it also created knotty problems: a vast, overwhelming flow of information pouring from a newly networked world, and a rapidly expanding system of knowledge production. In an essay entitled ‘As We May Think’, published in the Atlantic in 1945, the engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush wrote, There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialisation extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers – conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear.

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Von Neumann had spent the war consulting for the Manhattan Project, making frequent trips to the secret laboratory at Los Alamos in New Mexico and witnessing the first atomic bomb blast, code-named Trinity, in July 1945. He was the main proponent of the implosion method used in the Trinity test and the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and helped design the critical lenses that focused the explosion. Zworykin, like Vannevar Bush, had recognised that the information-gathering and retrieval abilities of new computing equipment, together with modern systems of electronic communication, allowed for the simultaneous analysis of vast amounts of data. But rather than focusing on human knowledge production, he anticipated its effects on meteorology.

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The next day, the New York Times reported on the conference under the headline ‘Weather to Order’, commenting that ‘if Dr Zworykin is right the weather-makers of the future are the inventors of calculating machines’.15 In 1947, the inventor of calculating machines par excellence was von Neumann himself, having founded the Electronic Computer Project at Princeton two years previously. The project was to build upon both Vannevar Bush’s analogue computer – the Bush Differential Analyser, developed at MIT in the 1930s – and von Neumann’s own contributions to the first electronic general-purpose computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC. ENIAC was formally dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania on February 15, 1946, but its origins were military: designed to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory, it spent the majority of its first years of operation predicting ever-increasing yields for the first generation of thermonuclear atomic bombs.

The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet
by Justin Peters
Published 11 Feb 2013

You can think of the Internet as a highway that is used by different programs. Your e-mail service is one of them. Instant-messaging applications are another. The World Wide Web is just another of these programs: a piece of software that allows computers to talk to one another. The Web became popular because of its linking capacity. In his proposal for Memex, Vannevar Bush advanced the idea that the associative trails between two disparate thoughts or facts could be captured and stored. The Web put a version of this idea into practice by allowing its users to link directly to other documents or websites: a feature called hypertext. The World Wide Web was modeled after an actual web, composed of threads—hypertext links—that spun out in all directions, connecting various far-flung nodes, or websites.

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An implicit objective was to employ the technology that Intrex developed to help the United States thwart the Soviet menace; from this perspective, libraries were important insofar as they could help scientists build new and better weapons more quickly. The keynote speaker who launched the Intrex conference that August was, appropriately, the godfather of what today we call Big Science. Vannevar Bush was no stranger to government-university partnerships. First as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s science adviser during World War II, and then as the motive behind the creation of the National Science Foundation, Bush, as much as anyone, was responsible for the militarization of American academic science.

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A mere school might not be able to do this, but an institution conceived so broadly as Technology [MIT] is well adapted for this great end.”50 Maclaurin died suddenly five days later, but the Technology Plan survived in the form of the new Division of Industrial Cooperation and Research, which was charged with marketing the school’s “scientific and industrial experience and creative aptitude” to companies willing and able to purchase such things.51 The program was financially successful, and the lessons MIT learned from its administration put the school in a position to acquire and manage millions of dollars’ worth of government contracts after the United States entered World War II. Former MIT engineering dean Vannevar Bush served as President Franklin Roosevelt’s science adviser during the war and directed large amounts of money toward university laboratories in an effort to develop technologies that could aid the war effort. As Bush later noted, “World War II was the first war in human history to be affected decisively by weapons unknown at the outbreak of hostilities,” which “demanded a closer linkage among military men, scientists, and industrialists than had ever before been required.”52 That linkage was particularly strong at MIT, where researchers at the school’s Radiation Laboratory developed microwave radar systems for the US military and “practically every member of the MIT Physics Department was involved in some form of war work,” as the department itself has stated.53 Academic science helped the Allies win the war—and the war helped the Allies win over academic science.

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere
by Kevin Carey
Published 3 Mar 2015

This information is routed to different parts of your visual cortex, which then integrates the data into coherent shapes. The same is true for variations of sound, taste, smell, and touch. Just by living, you are constantly awash in new information. This creates a biological version of the problem that Herbert Simon won a Nobel Prize for studying in organizations, and that Vannevar Bush’s Memex was designed to solve for the growing mass of research: too much information. Your brain solves this problem with patterns. Consider the sentence “My mother bought an encyclopedia.” When you read the word “encyclopedia,” it required very little time and mental effort for you to understand what it meant.

…

In 1957 he went to work at a company that shared the name and purpose of the Cold War university but not its nineteenth-century peculiarities: the Stanford Research Institute. The United States government acted on Vannevar Bush’s recommendations for scientific investment on a gargantuan scale. Enormous amounts of money came to California. Some of it went to the research universities, but much of it went to defense contractors and scientific facilities that had begun growing as the military managed points of its global communications and aeronautical networks in and around the San Francisco Bay. Like other universities, Stanford experienced an influx of students after the war. One of Vannevar Bush’s MIT graduate students was appointed dean of engineering.

…

Bill, which provided returning servicemen with money to attend college. The bill exceeded all expectations, with more than two million veterans enrolling in colleges across the country by the end of the decade. Then, a year after the G.I. Bill was enacted, the director of the national Office of Scientific Research and Development, Vannevar Bush, sent a report to President Truman titled Science: The Endless Frontier. Bush had a doctorate in electrical engineering from MIT, where he had served as a scientist and administrator. He and his colleagues had made important contributions to the emerging development of computer science; his student Claude Shannon helped develop the information theory that sits at the heart of modern computing.

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology
by Howard Rheingold
Published 14 May 2000

His service in 1918 was one of the reasons it was natural for Wiener's friend Vannevar Bush to think of Norbert thirty years later, when the allies needed a way to put firing tables directly into the radar-guided mechanism of antiaircraft guns. After the end of World War I, Norbert Wiener joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an instructor of mathematics. It turned out to be the beginning of his lifelong association with that institution. By the early 1920s, like his fellow polymath across the Atlantic, Wiener was turning out world-class papers in mathematics, logic, and theoretical physics. At MIT Wiener began his long friendship with Vannevar Bush, a man who in the early 1930s was deeply involved in the problems of building mechanical calculators, and in the 1940s took charge of the largest-scale administration of applied science in history.

…

Although the possibility of creating a personal tool still seemed economically infeasible, the idea of modernizing a community-based resource, like a library, began to appeal to him. He got fired up about the idea Vannevar Bush had mentioned in 1945, the concept of a new kind of library to fit the world's new knowledge system. "The PDP-1 opened me up to ideas about how people and machines like this might operate in the future," Licklider recalled in 1983, "but I never dreamed at first that it would ever become economically feasible to give everybody their own computer." It did occur to him that these new computers were excellent candidates for the super-mechanized libraries that Vannevar Bush had prophesied. In 1959, he wrote a book entitled Libraries of the Future, describing how a computer-based system might create a new kind of "thinking center."

…

At the end of the summer of 1945, just after the surrender of Japan, Engelbart was a twenty-year-old American naval radar technician, waiting for his ship home from the Philippines. One muggy day, he wandered into a Red Cross library that was built up on stilts, like a native hut. Vannevar Bush "It was quiet and cool and airy inside, with lots of polished bamboo and books. That was where I ran across that article by Vannevar Bush," Engelbart recalls. More than three decades later, he still fondly remembers the room where he first encountered the dream that has dominated most of his life. At that time, the news of Hiroshima was still fresh and searing.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara
Published 8 Jul 2019

The firm had defense industry roots: founded by Martin Marietta president George Bunker and TRW vice president Simon Ramo, the firm was dedicated to what the two founders termed “a national need in the application of electronics to information handling.” An early client was NASA, for which Bunker Ramo built one of the world’s first computerized information retrieval systems, using the networked computer to classify and categorize large data sets a la Vannevar Bush’s memex.16 At first, the system Bunker Ramo designed for the dealers was simply another digital database that put paper stock tables on line. But when the firm added a feature that allowed brokers to buy and sell over the network, AT&T again cried foul. This wasn’t time-sharing anymore, AT&T lawyers argued; it was two-way telecommunication, and Ma Bell would no longer lease Bunker Ramo its lines.17 Just like Thomas Carter, Bunker and Ramo pushed back.

…

Despite the name, the program wasn’t about libraries at all, nor about the digitization of the books within, but about what came next: organizing the cornucopia of Internet content created when a world of paper went paperless. It was a question bedeviling information science ever since Vannevar Bush had come up with the idea of the memex in the closing days of World War II, but one made far more urgent by the Internet’s commercialization. Even before the advent of the Mosaic browser, so much information was cascading around the online world that it had “come to resemble an enormous used book store,” reported Science, and more was being added by the day.

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Larry Owens, “The Counterproductive Management of Science in the Second World War: Vannevar Bush and the Office of Scientific Research and Development,” Business History Review 68, no. 4 (1994): 515–76; Time magazine, April 3, 1944, cover. Also see G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (New York: Free Press / Simon and Schuster, 1997). The idea of marshaling America’s scientists in the cause of war hadn’t been Bush’s alone—he shared credit with MIT President Karl Compton and Harvard President James Conant—but Bush was both the public face and the operational mind that put the idea into action. 8. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic, July 1, 1945, reprinted in Interactions 3, no. 2 (March 1996): 35–46. 9.

Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger
Published 1 Jan 2009

Wells wrote about a “world brain” through which “the whole human memory can be [ . . . ] made accessible to every individual.”3 A few years later, Vannevar Bush, the well-connected science administrator during World War II, fashioned what arguably became the most influential description of a perfect memory machine. In “As We May Think,” an article that appeared in 1945 in The Atlantic Monthly, Bush described a machine he called the memex (for “memory extender”), which “give[s] man access to and command of the inherited knowledge of the ages.”4 Users would not only consult the memex, but also continuously add information to its memory. Much like Well’s world brain, for Bush the memex would “implement[s] the way in which man produces, stores and consults the records of the race.”5 Vannevar Bush’s memex never materialized.

…

Much like Well’s world brain, for Bush the memex would “implement[s] the way in which man produces, stores and consults the records of the race.”5 Vannevar Bush’s memex never materialized. The technology wasn’t there, and Bush became distracted with other ventures. But a little more than half a century later, Gordon Bell has achieved most of what Bush envisioned—and more. He has succeeded in creating a gigantic external memory of his life, which he can access at random in seconds, and with just a few keystrokes. So what has changed between Bush and Bell? We have moved from the analog to the digital age. Modern technology has fundamentally altered what information can be remembered, how it is remembered, and at what cost.

…

Foxe, and Tracy L. Taylor. “Forgetting as an Active Process: An fMRI Investigation of Item-Method–Directed Forgetting.” Cerebral Cortex 18(3) (2008): 670–82. Yu, Peter K. “Of Monks, Medieval Scribes, and Middlemen.” Michigan State Law Review 2006: 1–31. Zachary, G. Pascal. Endless Frontier. Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century. New York: Free Press. 1997. Zauberman, Gal, Jonathan Levav, Kristin Diehl, and Rajesh Bhargave. “1995 Feels So Close Yet So Far.” Psychological Science 21(1) (2009): 133–39. Zick, Timothy. “Clouds, Cameras, and Computers: The First Amendment and Networked Public Places.”

When Things Start to Think
by Neil A. Gershenfeld
Published 15 Feb 1999

He realized that a computer could be more like a radar console than a typewriter, interactively drawing graphics, controlled by an assortment of knobs and levers. Picking up a theme that had been articulated by Vannevar Bush (the person most responsible for the government's support of scientific research during and after the war) in 1945 with his proposal for a mechanical extender of human memory called a Memex, Doug understood that such a machine could help people navigate through the increasingly overwhelming world of information. His colleagues thought that he was nuts. Computers were specialized machines used for batch processing, not interactive personal appliances.

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That's what much of academia and industry carefully prevent. The organization of research and development in the United States can be directly traced to an influential report that Vannevar Bush wrote for Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. Two technologies developed during World War II arguably ended the conflict, first radar and then nuclear bombs. These were created under the auspices of the then-secret Office of Scientific Research 172 + WHEN THINGS START TO THINK and Development, directed by Vannevar Bush. After the war President Roosevelt asked him to figure out how to sustain that pace of development for peacetime goals, including combating disease and creating jobs in new industries.

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By the time the THE BUSINESS OF DISCOVERY + I73 enabling legislations was passed in 1950 the title had changed to the National Science Foundation (NSF) since there were too many entrenched government interests unwilling to cede control in areas other than basic science. Vannevar Bush thought that a staff of about fifty people and a budget of $20 million a year should be sufficient to do the job. In 1997 the NSF had twelve hundred employees and a budget of $3 billion a year. Attracting new scientists is no longer a problem; finding research jobs for them is. The NSF gets so many proposals from so many people that simply doing great work is no longer sufficient to ensure adequate, stable, long-term funding. Vannevar Bush's system is straining under the weight of its own successful creation of an enormous academic research establishment.

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia
by Becky Hogge , Damien Morris and Christopher Scally
Published 26 Jul 2011

Bush describes his vision: Photocells capable of seeing things in a physical sense, advanced photography which can record what is seen or even what is not, thermionic tubes capable of controlling potent forces… cathode ray tubes… In fact, the memex reminds me of the disembodied Heath Robinson creations I saw littering the floor in the basement at the Chaos Communication Congress. But outside of Chaos, your average 21st-century computer user will be more familiar with the computer components that Doug Engelbart troubled himself over than with anything Vannevar Bush wrote about. Ask a child to draw a computer and he will draw a keyboard, screen, mouse and – possibly – a box sitting next to it. Yet the box is the computer – the rest of it is just input and output devices.

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And it was in this library that he read “As We May Think”, and decided to make Bush’s memex a reality. Reading “As We May Think” today brings home just how far the development of personal computer technology travelled in the course of the second half of the twentieth century. In 1945, the US’s leading scientist still needed to describe how each of the different mechanical disciplines – image capture, typewriting, microfiche – might need to develop in order to eventually combine, and create the “memex”. Today, we are so at home with the general-purpose machine – the computer – that the memex that presaged it sounds like a phantasmagoria of dying technologies strapped together for survival.

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Thus Engelbart methodically demonstrates his cut-and-paste text editing, his hyperlinking, and his hierarchical file systems. The historic demonstration is celebrated among computer engineers to this day. What inspired Douglas Engelbart’s genius was as far away from the hippy culture in which Brand was ensconced as it is possible to get. In 1945, about a month before Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima, Vannevar Bush – the primary organiser of the Manhattan Project – published an essay in Atlantic Monthly called “As We May Think”. At the time, Bush was working as the chief administrator of the application of science to warfare: as Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, he coordinated the activities of some 6,000 scientists.

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
by Clive Thompson
Published 11 Sep 2013

Perhaps the best-known early visionary of the Web, however, was Vannevar Bush. An American government scientist who pioneered analog computers, Bush was interested in how computers could improve human thought. In his 1945 essay “As We May Think,” he envisioned a device strikingly similar to Otlet’s. Like Drexel and Dewey, Bush worried that print was becoming unnavigable. “The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear,” he complained. His answer was the memex, a high-tech desk. “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.

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His recall of arcana is strengthened by repetition. “If you pull up the same fact seven or eight times, eventually you’ve been reencountering it so often that you wind up remembering it unaided,” he says. That is indeed what technological pioneers envisioned in their dreamy, visionary manifestos. When Vannevar Bush outlined the memex, he argued (as Drexel had centuries earlier) that a pocket library is useful only if you visit it again and again. It’s those refindings and remusings that spark meaning and insight. “A record, if it is to be useful,” Bush wrote, “. . . must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted

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Five years ago, a young grad student of Wegner’s, Betsy Sparrow, was watching a movie with her husband. Stuck on the name of one of the actors, she googled it. That made her wonder: Maybe people were using search engines, and digital retrieval, as transactive memory. Had search tools like Google become so omnipresent—so “intimate,” as Vannevar Bush foresaw—that they rivaled the ease of asking your spouse? To test this, Sparrow ran an experiment. She took a handful of students, gave them sentences of trivia, and had them type the sentences into a computer—factoids like “An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain” and “The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during reentry over Texas in Feb. 2003.”

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization
by Alexander R. Galloway
Published 1 Apr 2004

His imaginative offering was the Memex, a nonhierarchical, associative machine for inputting and outputting information. “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.”15 The innovation of the Memex, however, is its architecture. It was to constitute a 14. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” in Electronic Culture, ed. Timothy Druckrey (New York: Aperture, 1996), p. 40. 15. Bush, “As We May Think,” p. 41. Form 59 type of meshwork, a relational database of records operating on the principle of associative, rather than hierarchical, indexing.16 Both Wiener and Bush have therefore unwittingly contributed greatly to the tradition of Marxist media theory inaugurated by Brecht.

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The provocative but tantalizingly thin Pandemonium: The Rise of Predatory Locales in the Postwar World from architect Branden Hookway, looks at how cybernetic bodies permeate twentieth-century life. Other important theorists from the field of computer and media studies who have influenced me include Vannevar Bush, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Marshall McLuhan, Lewis Mumford, and Alan Turing. I am also inspired by Lovink’s new school of media theory known as Net criticism. This loose international grouping of critics and practitioners has grown up with the Internet and includes the pioneering work of Hakim Bey Introduction 18 and Critical Art Ensemble, as well as newer material from Timothy Druckrey, Marina Gržinić, Lev Manovich, Sadie Plant, and many others.

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He says as much: “One retains the general form of Marxist analysis . . . , but admits that the classical definition of productive forces is too restricted, so one expands the analysis in terms of productive forces to the whole murky field of signification and communication.”13 While ostensibly non-Marxist, it is worth noting here the work of Norbert Wiener and Vannevar Bush, two of the most important thinkers in the history of computers and electronic media. 9. Enzensberger, “Constituents,” p. 105. 10. Enzensberger, “Constituents,” p. 105. 11. Enzensberger, “Constituents,” p. 121. 12. Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,” in Video Culture, ed. John Hanhardt (Layton, UT: Peregrine Smith Books, 1986), p. 124. 13.

Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers
by John MacCormick and Chris Bishop
Published 27 Dec 2011

Most web browsers display hyperlinks underlined in blue so that they stand out easily. Hyperlinks are a surprisingly old idea. In 1945 — around the same time that electronic computers themselves were first being developed — the American engineer Vannevar Bush published a visionary essay entitled “As We May Think.” In this wide-ranging essay, Bush described a slew of potential new technologies, including a machine he called the memex. A memex would store documents and automatically index them, but it would also do much more. It would allow “associative indexing,…whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another”—in other words, a rudimentary form of hyperlink!

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QA76M21453 2012 006.3-dc22 2011008867 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This book has been composed in Lucida using TEX Typeset by T&T Productions Ltd, London Printed on acid-free paper press.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it. —Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” 1945 CONTENTS Foreword 1. Introduction: What Are the Extraordinary Ideas Computers Use Every Day? 2. Search Engine Indexing: Finding Needles in the World's Biggest Haystack 3. PageRank: The Technology That Launched Google 4. Public Key Cryptography: Sending Secrets on a Postcard 5.

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The book is dedicated, with love, to Kristine. SOURCES AND FURTHER READING As explained on page 8, this book does not use in-text citations. Instead, all sources are listed below, together with suggestions of further reading for those interested in finding out more about the great algorithms of computer science. The epigraph is from Vannevar Bush's essay “As We May Think,” originally published in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic magazine. Introduction (chapter 1). For some accessible, enlightening explanations of algorithms and other computer technology, I recommend Chris Bishop's 2008 Royal Institution Christmas lectures, videos of which are freely available online.

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything
by Matthew Ball
Published 18 Jul 2022

These words opened this book, and in the pages since, hopefully you’ve come to agree with this observation—and understand its limitations, too. Vannevar Bush had an uncanny ability to predict the devices of the future and much of what they might do, as well as the crucial role of government in making them useful and for the collective benefit. At the same time, his Memex was desk-sized and electromechanical—physically storing and connecting all the content a user might request. Today’s pocket-sized, software-operated computers resemble the Memex in spirit alone. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick imagined a future in which humankind had colonized space and sentient AI had emerged, but iPad-like displays were used for little more than watching TV while eating breakfast and telephones were still dumb and required cords.

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Chapter 13 META-BUSINESSES Chapter 14 METAVERSE WINNERS AND LOSERS Chapter 15 METAVERSAL EXISTENCE Conclusion SPECTATORS, ALL Acknowledgments Notes Index INTRODUCTION TECHNOLOGY FREQUENTLY PRODUCES SURPRISES that no one predicts. But the biggest and most fantastical developments are often anticipated decades in advance. In the 1930s, Vannevar Bush, then president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, began work on a hypothetical electromechanical device that would store all books, records, and communications, and mechanically link them together by keyword association, rather than traditional, mostly hierarchical storage models. Despite the enormity of its archive, Bush stressed that this “Memex” (short for “memory extender”) could be consulted “with exceeding speed and flexibility.” In the years that followed this early research, Bush became one of the most influential engineers and science administrators in American history.

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The Metaverse offers refuge and opportunity to millions. It was a virtual place where a pizza deliverer in the “real world” could be a talented swords­man with inside access to the hottest clubs. But Stephenson’s novel was clear: in Snow Crash the Metaverse has made life in the real world worse. As with Vannevar Bush, Stephenson’s influence on modern technology only grows with time, even if he is mostly unknown to the public. Conversations with Stephenson helped inspire Jeff Bezos to found the private aerospace manufacturer and suborbital spaceflight company Blue Origin in 2000, with the author working there part-time until 2006, when he became a senior advisor to the company (a position he still holds).

America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy
by Robert B. Zoellick
Published 3 Aug 2020

Chapter 12. Vannevar Bush: Inventor of the Future 1. Vannevar Bush, “Science, the Endless Frontier: A Report to the President by Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, July 1945” (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1945). The following citations refer to the 1960 version of the report reprinted under the title “Science, the Endless Frontier: A Report to the President on a Program for Postwar Scientific Research” (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 1960). 2. Quoted in G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 218.

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On January 29, 1935, the Senate passed the court protocol by a vote of 52 to 36, seven votes short of the necessary two-thirds.50 Root died in 1937 on the eve of his ninety-second birthday. He kept looking ahead until the end. Root’s last legal opinion, sent to MIT dean Vannevar Bush (in December 1936), was about MIT’s future patent policy. (Vannevar Bush, the subject of chapter 12, was the father of America’s application of science to policy.)51 International Law as an Element of U.S. Diplomacy Elihu Root, unlike some of his contemporaries, recognized the limits of international law. He knew that not all questions could be arbitrated.

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Soviet bloc forces were twelve times larger. The issue of Berlin was not resolved. As we will see, NATO would need to rely on a nuclear deterrent and careful alliance diplomacy through the very end of the Cold War.174 CHAPTER 12 Vannevar Bush Inventor of the Future Three Big Ideas In July 1945, as Americans were turning from the imperatives of war to the uncertainties of peace, Dr. Vannevar Bush advanced three ideas that shaped the nation’s security for the rest of the century. He wrote two as designs for the future, although for very different audiences. The third involved an immense blast in New Mexico.

Track Changes
by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
Published 1 May 2016

Stephen Hawking, whose first speech synthesizer was designed by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore and ran on an Apple II, is the most famous beneficiary of ongoing advances in adaptive character input; his current system uses a corpus of his published writing to predict upcoming words based on context.86 But the aspiration of total disembodiment is part of a teleology that has historically been bound up with the nexus of gender, labor, and inscription that we have been exploring in this chapter. Vannevar Bush’s 1945 “As We May Think” essay for the Atlantic is best remembered for its description of the Memex, a hypothetical document processing station that anticipated key aspects of electronic hypertext.87 But the Memex occupies only a portion of Bush’s text, which also foresaw technologies as diverse as digital photography and voice recognition. Perhaps its most remarkable prognostication comes at the very end, where Bush imagines a machine that would capture sensory input directly from the optic nerve and route it to an external textual record, thereby eliminating the middleware of manual transcription—and the need for a secretary, or “girl” (he uses the term elsewhere in the essay, whose pronouns are rigidly gendered throughout).

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In much the same way that the perceived excess of information in digital form is now a common focalizer for doubts and fears about the online world, the over-abundance of paper was the central anxiety of this earlier moment. Vannevar Bush was among the first to sound the alarm: he warned that the scientific research establishment that had been so crucial to the Allied war effort was increasingly in danger of being “bogged down” under a “mountain of research.”17 For Bush this was a generalized anxiety about the sheer quantity of information, and its division or compartmentalization into areas of increasing specialization. The scientist (or citizen) could not hope to keep up with it all without the advent of new tools for organizing information, the most important of which was the Memex, Bush’s interactive workstation for manipulating what was then another cutting-edge document technology: microfilm.

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Joao Medeiros, “Giving Stephen Hawking a Voice,” Wired, December 2, 2014, http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2015/01/features/giving-hawking-a-voice. See also Hélène Mialet, Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 87. Many previous scholars have written perceptively about the Memex. For just one example, see Losh, Virtualpolitik, 312–317. 88. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic, July 1, 1945, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/. 89. Frank Herbert with Max Barnard, Without Me You’re Nothing: The Essential Guide to Home Computers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), 206. 90.

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
by Charles Petzold
Published 28 Sep 1999

The use of both layers and both sides increases the capacity of DVDs to about 16 gigabytes, which is about 25 times the capacity of a CD. It's expected that DVD-ROM will eventually replace CD-ROM for the distribution of software. Are CD-ROM and DVD-ROM the modern day realization of Vannevar Bush's Memex? He originally conceived of Memex as using microfilm, but CD-ROM and DVD-ROM make much more sense for such a device. Electronic media have an advantage over physical media by being easily searchable. Unfortunately, few people have simultaneous access to multiple CD or DVD drives. The closest that we've come to Bush's concept doesn't involve storing all the information you'll need at your desk.

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The popular graphical part of the Internet is the World Wide Web, which makes use of HTTP, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. The actual data viewed on Web pages is defined by a text format called HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language. The hypertext part of these names is a word used to describe the linking of associated information, much like that proposed by Vannevar Bush for the Memex. An HTML file can contain links to other Web pages that can be easily invoked. HTML is similar to the Rich Text Format that I described earlier, in that it contains ASCII text with formatting information. HTML also allows referencing pictures in the form of GIF files, PNG (Portable Network Graphics) files, and JFIF (JPEG File Interchange Format) files.

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The Graphical Revolution Readers of the September 10, 1945, issue of Life magazine encountered mostly the usual eclectic mix of articles and photographs: stories about the end of the Second World War, an account of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky's life in Vienna, a photo essay on the United Auto Workers. Also included in that issue was something unexpected: a provocative article by Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) about the future of scientific research. Van Bush (as he was called) had already made his mark in the history of computing by designing one of the most significant analog computers—the differential analyzer—between 1927 and 1931 while an engineering professor at MIT. At the time of the Life article in 1945, Bush was serving as Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which had been responsible for coordinating U.S. scientific activities during the war, including the Manhattan Project.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
by Fred Turner
Published 31 Aug 2006

He was steeped in the cybernetic theories of his colleague Norbert Wiener, and it showed. In a highly influential 1960 paper entitled “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” Licklider imagined a form of human-machine Tak i n g t h e W h o l e E a r t h D i g i t a l [ 109 ] collaboration that surpassed even Vannevar Bush’s vision for the Memex: “The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.”

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By and large, they maintained clear distinctions between science and engineering and between military and civilian research.15 When Germany invaded Poland, however, these relatively independent specialists found themselves thrown into new interdisciplinary and interinstitutional collaborations. In 1940 former MIT professor and administrator Vannevar Bush persuaded Franklin Roosevelt to create the National Defense Research Committee, through which government dollars for military research would be funneled to civilian contractors, and to put him in [ 18 ] Chapter 1 charge of it. A year later the committee became the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD).

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These languages ranged from “the most function-specific jargons through semispecific pidgins, to full-fledged creoles”; they also included nonverbal elements, such as shared tools, which could be used to demonstrate concepts across disciplinary boundaries or serve as sites for collaborative work.26 According to Galison, scientists, engineers, and administrators in the wartime laboratories worked not so much as members of a single culture, but rather as members of different professional subcultures bound together by common purpose and a set of linguistic tools they had invented to achieve it.27 [ 20 ] Chapter 1 It was precisely this process and this institutional context that gave rise to the computational metaphor and the new philosophy of technology in which it made its first public appearance: Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics.28 A former mathematics prodigy, Wiener had joined the faculty of MIT in 1919 and soon began collaborating with Vannevar Bush, a professor of electrical engineering at the time. By the 1930s Wiener had achieved substantial renown for his work in mathematics, but he had also continued to venture into other disciplines, including electrical engineering, biology, and the study of computers. He worked especially closely with Bush, for instance, on the development of analog computers in the 1930s.

Team Human
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 22 Jan 2019

Even 9/11 was a simultaneously experienced, global event Jean-Marie Colombani, “Nous Sommes Tous Américains,” Le Monde, September 12, 2001. At the height of the television media era, an American president Ronald Reagan, “Tear Down This Wall!” speech, June 12, 1987. demand the construction of walls Donald Trump, speech, Phoenix, August 31, 2016. 41. In 1945, when Vannevar Bush imagined the “memex,” on which computers were based Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic, July 1945. Similar tensions are rising in India, Malaysia, and Sudan Kevin Roose, “Forget Washington. Facebook’s Problems Ahead Are Far More Disturbing,” Washington Post, October 29, 2017. 42. Highways divided neighborhoods, particularly when they reinforced racial and class divisions Douglas Rushkoff, Life, Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (New York: Random House, 2011).

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Something about this landscape has encouraged the regressive sentiments of the populist, nationalist, and nativist movements characterizing our time. These sentiments grow in an ecosystem fed by the other main bias of digital media: memory. Memory is what computers were invented for in the first place. In 1945, when Vannevar Bush imagined the “memex,” on which computers were based, he described it as a digital filing cabinet—an external memory. And even though they can now accomplish much more than data retrieval, everything computers do—all of their functions—simply involves moving things from one part of their memory to another.

The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can't See
by Gary Price , Chris Sherman and Danny Sullivan
Published 2 Jan 2003

Berners-Lee had been tinkering with programs that allowed relatively easy, decentralized linking capabilities for nearly a decade before he created the Web. He had been influenced by the work of Vannevar Bush, who served as Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II. In a landmark paper called “As We May Think,” Bush proposed a system he called MEMEX, “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” (Bush, 1945). The materials stored in the MEMEX would be indexed, of course, but Bush aspired to go beyond simple search and retrieval. The MEMEX would allow the user to build conceptual “trails” as he moved from document to document, creating lasting associations between different components of the MEMEX that could be recalled at a later time.

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In a whimsical acknowledgment of this structure, Jerry Wang and David Filo renamed their service “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,” commonly known today as Yahoo!. Table 1.1 A Timeline of Internet Search Technologies Year 1945 1965 1972 1986 1990 1991 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000+ Search Service Vannevar Bush Proposes “MEMEX” Hypertext Coined by Ted Nelson Dialog—First Commercial Proprietary System OWL Guide Hypermedia Browser Archie for FTP Search, Tim Berners-Lee creates the Web Gopher: WAIS Distributed Search ALIWEB (Archie Linking), WWWWander, JumpStation, WWWWorm EINet Galaxy, WebCrawler, Lycos, Yahoo!

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The MEMEX would allow the user to build conceptual “trails” as he moved from document to document, creating lasting associations between different components of the MEMEX that could be recalled at a later time. Bush called this “associative indexing … the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and 10 The Invisible Web automatically another. This is the essential feature of the MEMEX. The process of tying two items together is the important thing.” In Bush’s visionary writings, it’s easy for us to see the seeds of what we now call hypertext. But it wasn’t until 1965 that Ted Nelson actually described a computerized system that would operate in a manner similar to what Bush envisioned.

Dealers of Lightning
by Michael A. Hiltzik
Published 27 Apr 2000

Himself the inventor of a successful analog computer, Bush understood that computer technology might help society draw sense out of the chaos. He sketched out something called the “memex,” which he described as “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.” The mechanism of consultation would be “associative indexing…whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex.” Doug Engelbart first encountered Bush’s memex in a magazine article he found in an a Red Cross library in Manila, where he was awaiting transport home from his World War II service.

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The name derived from his conviction that the computer was not only capable of assisting the human thought process, but reinventing it on a higher plane. The “augmentation of human intellect,” as he defined it, meant that the computer’s ability to store, classify, and retrieve information would someday alter the very way people thought, wrote, and figured. Engelbart’s vision refined and expanded a concept memorably set forth by Dr. Vannevar Bush, an MIT engineering dean and wartime science advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1945 Bush had turned his attention to the scientific advances produced in the name of war and to how they might serve the peace. The result was a small masterpiece of scientific augury entitled “As We May Think,” which appeared in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

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As a team they infused Engelbart’s principles into PARC like apostles spreading religion. Thanks to them, the Augmentation Research Center left its indelible stamp on almost every major innovation to emerge from PARC in the next decade. Yet this triumph was not without its painful ironies. English’s reworked version of NLS, the direct descendant of Vannevar Bush’s vision and Engelbart’s work, would be remembered chiefly as PARC’s biggest failure. The agents of its ruin, as it happened, came to PARC via Bob Taylor’s second great heist. Taylor knew that up in Berkeley a handful of extraordinarily talented engineers were about to lose their jobs. In his view PARC could scarcely exist without them.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff
Published 24 Aug 2015

Engelbart’s researchers, an eclectic collection of buttoned-down white-shirted engineers and long-haired computer hackers, were taking computing in a direction so different it was not even in the same coordinate system. The Shakey project was struggling to mimic the human mind and body. Engelbart had a very different goal. During World War II he had stumbled across an article by Vannevar Bush, who had proposed a microfiche-based information retrieval system called Memex to manage all of the world’s knowledge. Engelbart later decided that such a system could be assembled based on the then newly available computers. He thought the time was right to build an interactive system to capture knowledge and organize information in such a way that it would now be possible for a small group of people—scientists, engineers, educators—to create and collaborate more effectively.

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The PageRank algorithm Larry Page developed to improve Internet search results essentially mined human intelligence by using the crowd-sourced accumulation of human decisions about valuable information sources. Google initially began by collecting and organizing human knowledge and then making it available to humans as part of a glorified Memex, the original global information retrieval system first proposed by Vannevar Bush in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945.11 As the company has evolved, however, it has started to push heavily toward systems that replace rather than extend humans. Google’s executives have obviously thought to some degree about the societal consequences of the systems they are creating.

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In the space of just a generation, a wave of computer-mediated communication technology had inaugurated a new way of facilitating collaboration between humans and machines. Gruber recognized that humans had evolved from using tribal communication to written language, and then quickly to using the telephone and computer communications. Computing had become a prosthesis, not in a bad sense, but rather as a way to augment human capabilities as first foreseen by Vannevar Bush, Licklider, and Engelbart. Intraspect and Hypermail had been efforts to build a cognitive prosthesis for work that needed to go beyond the size of a small tribe. The nature of collaboration was changing overnight. People could have conversations when they weren’t in the same room, or even in the same time zone.

Silence on the Wire: A Field Guide to Passive Reconnaissance and Indirect Attacks
by Michal Zalewski
Published 4 Apr 2005

According to a timeline[97] published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the concept of hyperlinking was first discussed in the Atlantic Monthly[98]back in 1945 by Vannevar Bush, a director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during and after World War II. Bush proposed a device called Memex, a personal, electromechanical unit that could, in fact, be seen as an early predecessor of today’s PDAs. Memex provided storage for a user’s documents and personal files and aimed to provide intuitive mechanisms for accessing the data. One of Memex’s features was its ability to create and follow links between documents stored on microfilm. For some reason, the idea of an insanely complex mechanical device running on microfilm did not really catch on back then.

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Braden (editor), “RFC1122: Requirements for Internet Hosts—Communication Layers,” Network Working Group (1989). [96] Salvatore Sanfilippo, “New TCP Scan Method,” Bugtraq, http://seclists.org/bugtraq/1998/Dec/0082.html (1998). [97] World Wide Web Consortium, http://www.w3c.org/History.html. [98] Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly 176, no. 1 (1945): 101-08. [99] Tim Berners-Lee, “Basic HTTP,” http://www.w3c.org/Protocols/HTTP/HTTP2.html. [100] R. Fielding, J. Gettys, J. Mogul, H. Frystyk, L. Masinter, P. Leach, T. Berners-Lee, “RFC2616: HyperText Transfer Protocol—HTTP/1.1.” Network Working Group (1999)

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And Using It with a Computer Lughry, Joe, The Implications of Aesthetics M MAC (Media Access Control) addresses, Some Theory, Attacking the Architecture in Ethernet protocol, Some Theory spoofing, Attacking the Architecture Mac OS 9, sequence number attractor patterns, Pretty Pictures: TCP/IP Stack Gallery malformed data detection, Detecting Malformed or Misdirected Data Manchester encoding, The Art of Transmitting Data mapping, Internet, Capturing the Moment masquerading, Packet Rewriting and NAT Maximum Segment Size (MSS), TCP Options, Window Size (TCP Layer), Segment Size Roulette in passive fingerprinting, Window Size (TCP Layer) in TCP headers, TCP Options with firewalls, Segment Size Roulette maximum transmission units (MTUs), The Type of Service Field (Eight Bits), Window Size (TCP Layer), Segment Size Roulette field for, The Type of Service Field (Eight Bits) in passive fingerprinting, Window Size (TCP Layer) with firewalls, Segment Size Roulette McLachlan, Donald, Using Topology Data for Origin Identification Media Access Control (MAC) addresses, Some Theory, Attacking the Architecture in Ethernet protocol, Some Theory spoofing, Attacking the Architecture Memex device, A (Very) Brief History of the Web memory, From Electronic Egg Timer to Computer, The Lesser Memory, The Lesser Memory, Implications: Subtle Differences and processing speed, The Lesser Memory flip-flops for, From Electronic Egg Timer to Computer in instruction sets, The Lesser Memory, Implications: Subtle Differences memory buffers for parasitic storage, Making Parasitic Storage Feasible mercury delay line memory, Parasitic Storage: The Early Days mesh-type topology data for triangulation, Network Stress Analysis message code field, Internet Control Message Protocol Packets message type field, Internet Control Message Protocol Packets meta-information storage, Privacy, Limited metrics for attackers, Defining Attacker Metrics MF (more fragments) field, Flags and Offset Parameters Microsoft Word, meta-information storage for, “Oops” Exposure: *_~1q'@@ . . . and the Password Is . . .

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone
by Brian Merchant
Published 19 Jun 2017

Sometimes, it’d be hard to tell the difference. In the 1940s and 1950s, some of the most influential computer scientists believed that personal computers would one day serve as knowledge augmenters—devices that would help people navigate an increasingly complex world. Vannevar Bush, a brilliant engineer and onetime head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, envisioned the memex, a “memory index” device that would allow users to access vast libraries of data with the touch of a hand. His colleague and disciple J.C.R. Licklider, meanwhile, had foreseen the dawning age of human-computer symbiosis: “The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought,” he wrote in 1950.

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Licklider, meanwhile, had foreseen the dawning age of human-computer symbiosis: “The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought,” he wrote in 1950. Neither had any inkling that the vessel that would ultimately tightly couple brain to computer—that would enable that human-machine symbiosis—would be the cell phone. Vannevar Bush’s memex, as diagrammed in Life magazine in 1945. In fact, the spark for modern computers and modern mobile phones was struck in the same space, foreshadowing the closeness with which they’d be bound. Cell phones became feasible pretty much immediately after the discovery of transistors, the key ingredient to modern computers, at Bell Labs.

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Carolyn Marvin’s When Old Technologies Were New provided context about the dawn of the electric age. Agar’s Constant Touch was a reference on the evolution of mobile technologies. Albert Robida’s The Twentieth Century is a portentous look at how audiovisual technologies might evolve. Other sources include “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush, which imagines the future of human knowledge augmentation and the memex; J.C.R. Licklider’s Man-Computer Symbiosis, which half predicted the iPhone through a skewed lens; Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics, which outlines the ways that a computer control system can influence lives; and Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg’s Personal Dynamic Media, which outlined a vision for personal computing that would set the enduring standard.

The Man Who Invented the Computer
by Jane Smiley
Published 18 Oct 2010

Zuse, Konrad. The Computer—My Life. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993. Articles Atanasoff, J. V., and A. E. Brandt. “Application of Punched Card Equipment to the Analysis of Complex Spectra.” Journal of the Optical Society of America 26 (1936): 83–85. Barnet, Belinda. “The Technical Evolution of Vannevar Bush’s Memex.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 2, no. 1 (2008): para. 12. Berry, Jean. “Clifford Edward Berry, 1918–1963: His Role in Early Computers.” History of Computing 8, no. 4 (October 8, 1986). Blannin, Alan. “Thomas Flowers.” Daily Telegraph, November 14, 1998. Colley, David P. “How World War II Wasn’t Won.”

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Calculating ever larger numbers requires ever more sensitive measurements, so that, for example, a slide rule, which calculates numbers by measuring distance, would have to be enormous (“the length of a football field, or in some instances a mile or more”) in order to represent the numbers Atanasoff was interested in calculating. One famous analog calculator that Atanasoff read about in the thirties was the Bush Differential Analyzer, developed in 1927–31 at MIT by Vannevar Bush, who had already founded the company that was to become Raytheon and would later head the National Defense Research Committee and the Office of Scientific Research and Development (which was in charge of what would become the Manhattan Project from 1941 until it was taken over by the army in 1943).

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While Atanasoff was pondering the Laplaciometer, Aiken, at Harvard, was trying to conceive of a way to improve Charles Babbage’s original Difference Engine. Harvard offered Aiken even less support than Atanasoff found at Iowa State College—in fact, President Conant actively discouraged him. Aiken then approached several mechanical calculating machine companies without success. Most computer inventors in the 1930s, including Vannevar Bush and Howard Aiken, were convinced that the future of computing lay in its past—in the theories of Charles Babbage (1791–1871), who had begun laying out his ideas for a mechanical calculator in 1822 and proposed constructing it to the Royal Astronomical Society. It was an analog device, designed to solved polynomial equations using shafts and toothed gears.

Social Life of Information
by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
Published 2 Feb 2000

The sense that the information is ''there" somewhere, but can't be found can drive anyone to digitize. It motivated Vannevar Bush, a pioneer in computer design and grandfather of the U.S. National Science Foundation, which has proved a generous funder of much digital library research. In a famous article in the Atlantic, Bush suggested that the difficulty scientists had in getting access to each other's work seriously damaged scientific progress. As a solution, he envisaged a system, Memex, which would compress and store documents in such a form that scientists could have access to a database of scientific knowledge from their desks Page 180 through "a sort of mechanized private file and library." 9 Memex, as many people have pointed out, looks like a prototype for the World Wide Web.

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As a solution, he envisaged a system, Memex, which would compress and store documents in such a form that scientists could have access to a database of scientific knowledge from their desks Page 180 through "a sort of mechanized private file and library." 9 Memex, as many people have pointed out, looks like a prototype for the World Wide Web. The idea of a mechanized (now digitized) library has held out a popular promise that what people now find in conventional libraries will eventually be available on-line. Yet the dream of making all printed material digitally accessibleeven all the books in your local library, let alone all the books in the Library of Congressdied not long after it was born. Project Gutenberg, a well-established attempt to put the texts of books on-line helps illustrate one difficulty.

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For the Chronicle, see http://sfgate.com [1999, July 21]. The Guardian Web site (http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk [1999, July 21]) looks both naïve and ambitious, a common Web trait and often a winning one. We get back to the question of immediacy and archiving at the end of this chapter. 9. Bush, 1945. Intriguingly, Bush hoped that Memex would control the "growing mountain" of information, whereas the Web seems to have accelerated that growth. Page 278 10. See Project Gutenberg's on-line history, http://www.gutenberg.net/history.html [1999, July 21]. Undoubtedly, Project Gutenberg is not a very sophisticated project. But that might be to its advantage.

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything
by Peter Morville
Published 14 May 2014

Today, it’s easy to get lost in the streams of Facebook and Netflix, but back then it was all about the bridges. In 1934, Paul Otlet envisioned a scholar’s workstation that turned millions of 3 x 5 index cards into a web of knowledge by using a new kind of relationship known as the “Link.”lxiv In 1945, Vannevar Bush imagined the memex, a machine that enabled its users to share an associative “web of trails.”lxv In the early 60s, Ted Nelson coined “hypertext” and set out to build Xanadu, a non-sequential writing system with visible, clickable, unbreakable, bi-directional hyperlinks. lxvi Figure 3-1. Ted Nelson’s Xanalogical Structure.

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by Francis Crick, Christof Koch (2005). lxii A “black swan” is a pivotal event that’s hard to predict or imagine in advance. Nassim Taleb popularized the term in his book, The Black Swan (2007). lxiii Soon Love Soon by Vienna Teng. lxiv Cataloging the World by Alex Wright (2014). lxv As We May Think by Vannevar Bush (1945). lxvi Project Xanadu by Ted Nelson, http://www.xanadu.com. lxvii A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect by Doug Englebart (1968). lxviii Englebart’s violin was a chorded keyboard designed to be used in concert with a traditional typewriter keyboard and a mouse. lxix The Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniques by Marcia J.

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
by Scott Rosenberg
Published 2 Jan 2006

In a 1945 essay titled “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush, who oversaw the U.S. government’s World War II research program, unveiled his blueprint for the Memex, a desk console with tape recorders in its guts that would give a researcher ready access to a personal trove of knowledge. Bush’s Memex provided the nascent field of computing with its very own grail. For decades it would inspire visionary inventors to devise balky new technologies in an effort to deliver an upgrade to the human brain. By far the most ambitious and influential acolyte of the Memex dream was Douglas Engelbart, best known today as the father of the computer mouse.

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The principles behind Agenda are outlined in a development document from the original team, available at http://home.neo.rr.com/pim/article1.htm. James Fallows’s article on Agenda appeared in the Atlantic in May 1992. “In science the whole system builds”: Linus Torvalds, quoted in Business Week, August 18, 2004, at http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content /aug2004/tc20040818_1593.htm. Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” first appeared in the Atlantic in July 1945. It is available at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush. My account of Douglas Engelbart’s work draws on readings from his work collected at the Bootstrap Institute Web site at http://www.bootstrap.org/, as well as the accounts in Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping (Stanford University Press, 2000); Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought (Simon & Schuster, 1985); and John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said (Viking, 2005).

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia
by Andrew Lih
Published 5 Jul 2010

The idea of hypertext, or arbitrary linking among electronic documents, is usually dated back to 1945, when American scientist Vannevar Bush published “As We May Think” in the Atlantic Monthly magazine. He proposed a memex, a microfilm-based system of documents that would eventually provide inspiration for the World Wide Web. But the most prescient of his predictions was what he foresaw in hyperlinked information. “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.” He was basically describing what we know today as Web surfing.

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But given the vocabulary of the 1940s, he could only express the idea in the language of “microfilm.” It’s amusing to think of today’s Internet activity happening through sheets of microfilm, but Bush was well ahead of his time on the implications of linking together information seamlessly. As a tool to accomplish this memex function of linking and organizing data, HyperCard had a cult following, as it was easy to use, yet powerful. People could create an interlinked series of documents at the touch of a mouse. This was many years before the first Web browser was even conceived. Fortunately, Cunningham had early access to HyperCard through a former Tektronix employee named Kent Beck, with whom he had worked.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
by Steven Levy
Published 12 Apr 2011

Berners-Lee could sum up his vision in a sentence: “Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked … there would be a single global information space.” The web’s pedigree could be traced back to a 1945 paper by the American scientist Vannevar Bush. Entitled “As We May Think,” it outlined a vast storage system called a “memex,” where documents would be connected, and could be recalled, by information breadcrumbs called “trails of association.” The timeline continued to the work of Douglas Engelbart, whose team at the Stanford Research Institute devised a linked document system that lived behind a dazzling interface that introduced the metaphors of windows and files to the digital desktop.

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“The unit of thinking around here is a terabyte,” said Google engineering head Wayne Rosing in 2003. (A terabyte is equal to around 10 trillion bits of data.) A thirty-year Silicon Valley veteran whose résumé boasted important posts at DEC, Apple, and Sun, Rosing had joined Google in 2001 in part because he saw that it had the potential to realize the vision of Vannevar Bush’s famous memex paper, which he had read in high school. “It doesn’t even get interesting until there’s more than many terabytes involved in problems. So that drives you into thinking of hundreds of thousands of computers as the generic way to solve problems.” When you have that much power to solve problems, you have the ability to do much more than solve them faster.

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Nelson’s work inspired Bill Atkinson, a software engineer who had been part of the original Macintosh team; in 1987 he came up with a link-based system called HyperCard, which he sold to Apple for $100,000 on the condition that the company give it away to all its users. But to really fulfill Vannevar Bush’s vision, you needed a huge system where people could freely post and link their documents. By the time Berners-Lee had his epiphany, that system was in place: the Internet. While the earliest websites were just ways to distribute academic papers more efficiently, soon people began writing sites with information of all sorts, and others created sites just for fun.

Possiplex
by Ted Nelson
Published 2 Jan 2010

But I cited it in my foundational hypertext articles, and it became the semi-official Beginning of the Hypertext Field. In 1968, I think it was, I was at the Spring Joint Computer Conference in Boston. I got a handful of change and picked up the payphone and simply called information. Vannevar Bush was listed in some Boston suburb. He himself answered the phone. I told him I was working on ideas similar to his memex and would like to get together with him to discuss it on some later trip. He wanted very much to discuss it with me, he said. But I hated him instantly. He sounded like a sports coach. I knew I would not follow up, even if I managed to get to Boston again.

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Postal scale and piano keyboard meant to stand in for arbitrary hardware that would become available. Theological Seminary.) (Slide from author's talk at Union About six years later they started building computers like this at Xerox PARC. The Iphone? (Slide from author's talk at Union Theological Seminary, 1968.) Keyboard and microphone are shown attached to camera. What would Vannevar Bush have said? ca. 1968 I believe I read Bush's "As We May Think" when it came out in 1945-- twice, indeed; first in The Atlantic, which I think was read aloud around the Saturday lunch table at our farm; and then when it was reprinted in LIFE. (Since I was eight when it came out, there is no knowing, but my family subscribed to both magazines and the article was certainly on my wavelength.)

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Then, around 1979, Ron Baecker invited me to speak at the University of Toronto, and Ron actually set up a lunch with McLuhan. (McLuhan was by now a full media celebrity-- a term derived from his own popularization of the term "media"-- the pinnacle of which was his wacky cameo appearance in "Annie Hall" in 1977.) I had hated Vannevar Bush immediately on the phone, but in the same way I loved McLuhan immediately. He was very grand and dignified-- a vanishing Canadian type I had met before as a boy. He was pompous, but with a remarkable warmth. (I believe he had a mustache on that occasion, though he is usually depicted without one.)

Paper: A World History
by Mark Kurlansky
Published 3 Apr 2016

The physician, puzzled by a patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior. —VANNEVAR BUSH, “AS WE MAY THINK,” The Atlantic, JULY 1945 HE PROBLEM WITH THE ENDING OF HISTORY BOOKS—also the beginning—is that history, unlike books, has no beginning and no end; it keeps flowing. With remarkable frequency, the phrase is uttered, “The world is changing.” It is certainly true that the world is changing, but this sentence is often announced as though the world had never changed before.

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He continued: “If you look at the history of computers, they were more conceived of as a calculating engine and filing cabinet than as literary machines.” Ironically, this was also true of the written word when it was first invented and also the first uses of paper. The first function was for facilitating calculations, and the second for storing information. It seems to be the order in which people think or possibly how they prioritize. Vannevar Bush, an engineer born in the nineteenth century, was one of the early geniuses of electronics, and was in charge of US military research during World War II. He shaped the thinking of many others, including Kapor, with a 1945 essay in The Atlantic entitled “As We May Think.” Essentially, he was addressing the same issue that Diderot had addressed 190 years earlier: as the accumulated knowledge of humans gets ever greater, won’t we reach a point where it is too much to access, too much to sift through?

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Essentially, he was addressing the same issue that Diderot had addressed 190 years earlier: as the accumulated knowledge of humans gets ever greater, won’t we reach a point where it is too much to access, too much to sift through? In 1755, Diderot foresaw the future need for a data bank even though he did not know what it would look like or what to call it. Similarly, in 1945, after the explosion of information created by the war, Vannevar Bush realized that computers were needed. Society creates the technology that it needs. This urgent issue regarding information storage, first expressed by Diderot, is what drove computer technology forward. Computers were not developed to replace books or paper; they were developed to be a better way to store and access information.

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
by David Brin
Published 1 Jan 1998

Above all, we have to know what the Internet is, and where it came from. Todayʼs computer interconnection network has roots stretching back to 1945, when Vannevar Bush, who helped oversee the Manhattan Project, wrote an article entitled “As We May Think,” claiming that scientific ingenuity in the postwar era should focus on new tools for thought. He called for a system of links and trails between islands of information—using text, images, and sound. Bush called the device performing this role a memex. Marc Andreesen, designer of Mosaic and Netscape, looks back upon Bush as a prophet who addressed “fundamental ideas we are still trying to realize today.”

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Whenever I ask this question, modern Internet aficionados answer that “they must not have realized where this would lead.” But even early versions of the Internet showed its essential features: hardiness, flexibility, diversity, and resistance to tight regulation. A more reasonable hypothesis may be that some of those who consented to creating the nascent Internet were influenced by Vannevar Bush, and had an inkling that they were midwifing something that might ultimately distribute authority rather than concentrate it. The critical moment came when a decision was made to let private networks interconnect with the governmentʼs system. Steve Wolff of the National Science Foundation presided over this delicate era, as systems like Uunet, Csnet, and the anarchic Usenet linked up, taking matters beyond the point of no return.

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Instead, many of those big shots of the 1970s and 1980s willingly let their institutions “tithe” a steady subsidy for irrelevant, extracurricular, impractical, unprofitable, flippant, and even trivial uses, defying the prosaic image of mean-minded bureaucrats by watering a crop whose emerging properties they could but dimly perceive. (See chapter 2 references to the prescience of Vannevar Bush.) 153 Steven E. Miller, Civilizing Cyberspace: Policy, Power and the Information Superhighway (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1996). 153 ... individuals will tend to gravitate towards a safe average, suppressing their individuality and creativity in favor of ... the demands of an omniscient observer ...

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution
by Henry Schlesinger
Published 16 Mar 2010

Mallory would eventually shift entirely into the battery field and then, following Mallory’s death, move through several owners, including Dart Industries, Kraft Foods, Wall Street investors, and, finally, Gillette, along the way changing its name to Duracell. 15 The Endless Frontier “A spider web of metal, sealed in a thin glass container, a wire heated to brilliant glow, in short, the thermionic tube of radio sets…Its gossamer parts, the precise location and alignment involved in its construction, would have occupied a master craftsman of the guild for months; now it is built for thirty cents. The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.” —Dr. Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) Bombers flowing off assembly lines and warships splashing into the water after christening are iconic images of America’s World War II industrial effort. Sources of pride and propaganda, reports from factory floors on the home front were nearly as ubiquitous and dramatic as dispatches from the distant battlefields of Europe and Asia.

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At one point veterans made up nearly half of the college students in the United States. All told, some 91,000 scientists and 450,000 engineers studied through GI Bill benefits following World War II, including 14 Nobel Prize–winners in science. Some saw the peacetime potential of the advanced technology early on. Dr. Vannevar Bush, who envisioned and then headed the National Defense Research Committee as well as its 2.0 wartime version, the Office of Scientific Research and Development, charged with applying the latest technology to warfare, was quick to spot the future. In two landmark essays, “As We May Think” (The Atlantic), and “Science the Endless Frontier: A Report to the President,” he exhibited uncanny prescience as to the future role of technology.

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However, it is those very elements that make it unfair—all those differences between the hybrid apples and the iPod oranges—that need to be addressed. To make alternate energy a reality by adapting existing technology or developing new technology will require the kind of technological well-funded push afforded reluctantly to Samuel Morse for his electromagnetic telegraph, advocated by Vannevar Bush in his “Endless Frontier” essay, or promised by President Kennedy through NASA. ON A MUCH SMALLER SCALE, MIT researchers are experimenting with microbatteries about half the size of a human cell. However, it isn’t the size of the battery that has generated interest, it is the assembly process.

Raw Data Is an Oxymoron
by Lisa Gitelman
Published 25 Jan 2013

Potential possibilities for improving the Bielefeld 1951ff. recording system emerge almost inevitably with the steady triumphant progress of the now universal paper machine of 1937, which produces new computer generations and calculating speeds on a quarterly basis. Logically, an electronic slip box allows one faster access to random terms and likewise, in combination with logical connections, to never overlook—or forget—character strings in the electronic resources. Thanks to hypertext, the idea for which goes back to Vannevar Bush’s thought-expanding machine Memex from 1945,30 the formerly tediously annotated references can be traced and (automatically) connected with an equally time-optimized strategy of click and rush.31 However, even if Luhmann’s method follows a clear algorithm, and he functions in a certain sense as a computer, this is still a long way from a digital notebook or laptop.

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“If I have nothing else to do, then I write the whole day; in the mornings from 8:30 am until midday, then I briefly go walking with my dog, then I have time again in the afternoon from 2 pm until 4 pm, then it’s the dog’s turn again. . . .Yes, then I write again in the evenings, Paper as Passion as a rule, until around 11 pm. At 11 pm I mostly lie in bed and read a few more things.” Luhmann, Archimedes und wir, 145; my emphasis. 29. Ibid.; also Andrew Hodges and Alan Turing, The Enigma, vol. 1 of Computerkultur, 2nd ed. (Wien, New York: Springer-Verlag, 1994), 115ff. 30. See Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic Monthly 15, no. 176 (1945): 101–108. 31. For one such attempt to expand upon Bielefeld 1951ff. and bring it into electronic form, see synapsen, http://www.verzetteln.de/synapsen. 32. Amid his wandering, he always kept these incunabula of his education. They lie partly in portfolios, partly in cases, on the backs of which a label was glued for orientation.

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science
by Michael Nielsen
Published 2 Oct 2011

Here, I describe a few of the sources that have most decisively influenced my thinking, and suggest further reading. Collective intelligence: The idea of using computers to amplify individual and collective human intelligence has a long history. Influential early works include Vannevar Bush’s celebrated article “As We May Think” [31], which described his imagined memex system, and inspired the seminal work of both Douglas Engelbart [63] and Ted Nelson [145]. Although these works are many decades old, they lay out much of what we see in today’s internet, and reveal vistas beyond. Aside from these foundational works, my ideas about collective intelligence have been strongly influenced by economic ideas.

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And, finally, Jane Jacobs’s masterpiece The Death and Life of Great American Cities [98] is a superb account of how very large groups tackle a core human problem: how to make a place to live. Networked science, in general: The potential of computers and the network to change the way science is done has been discussed by many people, and over a long period of time. Such discussion can be found in many of the works describd above, in particular the work of Vannevar Bush [31] and Douglas Engelbart [63]. Other notable works include those of Eric Drexler [57], Jon Udell [227], Christine Borgman [23], and Jim Gray [83]. See also Tim Berners-Lee’s original proposal for the world wide web, reprinted in [14]. A stimulating and enjoyable fictional depiction of networked science is Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End [231].

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I’m a solver. Perspectives on Innovation (blog), February 4, 2009. http://blog.innocentive.com/2009/02/04/im-a-solver-zacary-brown/. [30] Admiral Bumblebee. Comment on submission “Kasparov versus the World,” 2007. http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/2hvex/kasparov_versus _the_world/. [31] Vannevar Bush. As we may think. Atlantic Monthly, July 1945. [32] Declan Butler. Flu database row escalates. The Great Beyond (blog), September 14, 2009. http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2009/09/flu_database_row_ escalates.html. [33] Robert H. Carlson. Biology Is Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010

Emergence
by Steven Johnson

This constituted a singular technological expansion of human power whose only parallel is the change that has taken place in our own time.” Ibid., 33. The neighborhood system: Decades before the first graphical interface was designed, Wiener connected the problems of communal information and software interface, gesturing to Vannevar Bush’s visionary essay on the Memex: “On the other hand, the human organism contains vastly more information, in all probability, than does any one of its cells. There is thus no necessary relation in either direction between the amount of racial or tribal or community information and the amount of information available to the individual. . . .

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As in the case of the individual, not all the information which is available to the race at one time is accessible without special effort. There is a well-known tendency of libraries to become clogged by their own volume; of the sciences to develop such a degree of specialization that the expert is often illiterate outside his own minute specialty. Dr. Vannevar Bush has suggested the use of mechanical aids for the searching through vast bodies of material.” Wiener, 158. The specialization of: “Early in the evolution of life-forms, specialized organs developed the ability to maintain internal states and respond differently to external stimuli. The trend ever since has been toward more complex and capable nervous systems with the ability to store extensive memories; recognize patterns in visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli; and engage in increasingly sophisticated levels of reasoning.

The Tangled Web: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications
by Michal Zalewski
Published 26 Nov 2011

So, pardon me another brief detour as we return to the roots. The prehistory of the Web is fairly mundane but still worth a closer look. Tales of the Stone Age: 1945 to 1994 Computer historians frequently cite a hypothetical desk-sized device called the Memex as one of the earliest fossil records, postulated in 1945 by Vannevar Bush.[88] Memex was meant to make it possible to create, annotate, and follow cross-document links in microfilm, using a technique that vaguely resembled modern-day bookmarks and hyperlinks. Bush boldly speculated that this simple capability would revolutionize the field of knowledge management and data retrieval (amusingly, a claim still occasionally ridiculed as uneducated and naïve until the early 1990s).

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. %> blocks, Interactions Between Multiple Tags and file extensions in URLs, The Perils of Plug-in Content-Type Handling and multiline headers, Newline Handling Quirks and RFC 2047 encoding, Header Character Set and Encoding Schemes \ (backslash) in URLs, Fragment ID characters in URL scheme name ignored by, Scheme Name clickjacking, Cross-Domain Content Inclusion content sniffing, Unrecognized Content Type cookies, Security Policy for Cookies data: URLs in, Inheritance for data: URLs delete attempt of JavaScript function, Overriding Built-Ins extension matching, Unrecognized Content Type fallback display, Plaintext Files frames, Frame Descendant Policy and Cross-Domain Communications JavaScript in, Browser-Side Scripts JSON.parse() function alternative, Impact on Potential Uses of the Language local file access, Local Files markup controlled charset on, Character Set Inheritance and Override multiline string literals support, Parser Resynchronization Risks non-recognition of vertical tab, Access to Other Documents NUL character and, The Battle over Semantics, Understanding HTML Parser Behavior origin check and port number, Content Isolation Logic printable characters in, Reserved Characters and Percent Encoding proprietary security-restricted parameter, Sandboxed Frames redirects to about:blank, Origin Inheritance same-origin policy and, Same-Origin Policy for the Document Object Model, Privacy-Related Side Channels Silverlight and, Properties of ActionScript stored password retrieval, Form-Based Password Managers SWF file handling without Content-Type, Document Type Detection Logic text/plain document type, Special Content-Type Values third-party cookies blocking, Limitations on Third-Party Cookies time limits on continuously executing scripts, Denial-of-Service Attacks Trident parsing engine, Hypertext Markup Language VBScript, Browser-Side Scripts, The Living Dead: Visual Basic window.open() function and, Pop-Up Filtering Windows Presentation Foundation plug-ins, XML Browser Applications (XBAP) XDomainRequest approach to, Same-Origin Policy for XMLHttpRequest XSS-detection logic, XSS Filtering zone model, Internet Explorer’s Zone Model Zone.Identifier metadata, Internet Explorer’s Zone Model Internet Information Server, and Host headers, Proxy Requests Internet service providers, Cookies and “Legitimate” DNS Hijacking Internet zone, for Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer’s Zone Model interstitials, Pop-Up Filtering intrusions, Enter Risk Management, Enter Risk Management, Enter Risk Management escalation of, Enter Risk Management nonmonetary costs, Enter Risk Management Invisible Gorilla experiment, Timing Attacks on User Interfaces IP addresses, and cookies, Java ISO (International Organization for Standardization), The First Browser Wars: 1995 to 1999 ISO-8859-1 (Western European code page), Header Character Set and Encoding Schemes itms: scheme, Common URL Schemes and Their Function itpc: scheme, Common URL Schemes and Their Function IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems, New and Upcoming Security Features J Jackson, Collin, Nonconvergence of Visions, Frame Descendant Policy and Cross-Domain Communications, Privacy-Related Side Channels, XDomainRequest jar: scheme, Protocols Claimed by Third-Party Applications and Plug-ins Java, Properties of ActionScript, Java Java Runtime Environment (JRE), Sun Java JavaScript, Tales of the Stone Age: 1945 to 1994, The First Browser Wars: 1995 to 1999, The Boring Period: 2000 to 2003, Type-Specific Content Inclusion, Browser-Side Scripts, Browser-Side Scripts, Basic Characteristics of JavaScript, Function Resolution, Code Execution, Code Execution, Execution Ordering Control, Code and Object Inspection Capabilities, Setters and Getters, JavaScript Object Notation and Other Data Serializations, E4X and Other Syntax Extensions, Standard Object Hierarchy, The Document Object Model, Access to Other Documents, Script Character Encoding, Plaintext Files, XML User Interface Language, The Perils of Plug-in Content-Type Handling, Same-Origin Policy for the Document Object Model and WML Script (WMLS), XML User Interface Language character encoding in, Access to Other Documents code and object inspection capabilities, Execution Ordering Control code execution, Code Execution code inclusion modes and nesting risks, Script Character Encoding Document Object Model, The Boring Period: 2000 to 2003, Standard Object Hierarchy, The Document Object Model document.domain property, Same-Origin Policy for the Document Object Model embedded in PDF documents, The Perils of Plug-in Content-Type Handling execution order control, Code Execution labeled statements support, JavaScript Object Notation and Other Data Serializations MIME type, Plaintext Files Netscape and, Browser-Side Scripts runtime environment for, Code and Object Inspection Capabilities script processing model, Basic Characteristics of JavaScript setters and getters, Setters and Getters standard object hierarchy, E4X and Other Syntax Extensions variable declaration, Function Resolution JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), Impact on Potential Uses of the Language, Access to Other Documents javascript: scheme, Protocols Claimed by Third-Party Applications and Plug-ins, Inheritance for data: URLs Jobs, Steve, Document Rendering Helpers JPEG file format, Type-Specific Content Inclusion JScript, The First Browser Wars: 1995 to 1999 JScript.Encode, Code Inclusion Modes and Nesting Risks JSObject mechanism, Java JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), Impact on Potential Uses of the Language, Access to Other Documents JSON.parse() function, alternatives, Impact on Potential Uses of the Language JSONP (JSON with padding), JavaScript Object Notation and Other Data Serializations, Criticisms of CSP K Kaminsky, Dan, The Unusual Danger of “localhost” katakana, Handling of Non-US-ASCII Text keepalive sessions, 400-499: Client-Side Error, Execution Time and Memory Use Restrictions keystroke redirection, Beyond the Threat of a Single Click Kinugawa, Masato, Markup-Controlled Charset on Subresources L language parameter, for <script> tag, Script Character Encoding Lessig, Lawrence, Prohibited Ports LF (newline), HTTP quirks in handling, Newline Handling Quirks LFI (local file inclusion), Problems to Keep in Mind in Web Application Design Lie, Wium, Håkon, Cascading Style Sheets LiveScript, Browser-Side Scripts livescript: scheme, Protocols Claimed by Third-Party Applications and Plug-ins loadPolicyFile() method, Markup-Level Security Controls local file inclusion (LFI), Problems to Keep in Mind in Web Application Design local files, access issues, Hostnames with Extra Periods local intranet zone, for Internet Explorer, Form-Based Password Managers local machine zone, for Internet Explorer, Form-Based Password Managers localhost, danger of, Problems with Domain Restrictions localStorage object (JavaScript), Same-Origin Policy for XMLHttpRequest location headers, sending user-controlled, Error-Handling Rules location object (JavaScript), Standard Object Hierarchy, The Unusual Danger of “localhost” location of documents, changing, Life Outside Same-Origin Rules location.hash, URL- and Protocol-Level Proposals location.host property, Life Outside Same-Origin Rules login forms, autocompletion by browsers, Form-Based Password Managers lookup functions, in Document Object Model, Standard Object Hierarchy loopback interfaces, The Unusual Danger of “localhost” Lynx, Tales of the Stone Age: 1945 to 1994 M Macromedia Flash, Adobe Flash mail user agent (MUA), Unrecognized Content Type mailto: protocol, Scheme Name, Common URL Schemes and Their Function, URL- and Protocol-Level Proposals malicious sites, blacklist-driven attempts to block, Extrinsic Site Privileges managed code, Microsoft Silverlight Mark of the Web (MotW), Defensive Uses of Content-Disposition, Mark of the Web and Zone.Identifier markup filter for user content, A Note on Cross-Site Request Forgery mashups, Frame Hijacking Risks Math.random() function, Standard Object Hierarchy MathML (Mathematical Markup Language), Document Parsing Modes, Scalable Vector Graphics max-age parameter, HTTP Cookie Semantics, HTTP Cookie Semantics, Strict Transport Security for cookie, HTTP Cookie Semantics for STS record, Strict Transport Security media capture, Content-Level Features Memex, Tales of the Stone Age: 1945 to 1994 memory pointers, Common Problems Unique to Server-Side Code memory use restrictions for scripts, Denial-of-Service Attacks meta-policies, for Flash, Cross-Domain Policy Files mhtml protocol, Encapsulating Pseudo-Protocols Microsoft Office, Document Rendering Helpers Microsoft Silverlight, Audio and Video, Microsoft Silverlight, Policy File Spoofing Risks Microsoft.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

“New frontiers of the mind are before us, and if they are pioneered with the same vision, boldness, and drive with which we have waged this war we can create a fuller and more fruitful employment and a fuller and more fruitful life,” Roosevelt wrote. The response from the OSRD head Vannevar Bush—a proposal for a National Research Foundation titled “Science, the Endless Frontier”—is a legendary document among scholars of postwar America, but by its July 25, 1945, postmark, the intended recipient had been dead for three months.1 The memo made its way to Truman, and Congress began debating the future of federal scientific research. Vannevar Bush wasn’t a Stanford man, but he was one of the models for the archetype.i Operating at the highest levels of academia (MIT VP and dean of engineering), the tech industry (inventor and Raytheon founder), and the military state, Bush was just the sort of person who came to lead Palo Alto.

…

In that era, the new science of electrical engineering was about electrification: how to create, maintain, and improve a national network of electricity production and distribution. After all, the California gadget tinkerers needed to plug in to something. Terman distinguished himself at MIT working on the properties of transmission lines under the young and respected engineer-entrepreneur Vannevar Bush, whom he watched spin research on rectifying household current into an electrical appliance company called Raytheon. Three days after his twenty-fourth birthday, Fred Terman received his doctorate in electrical engineering from MIT, only the eighth person to do so. Still a genius, and still not much more than a child, considering how sheltered his life had been to that point, Fred was in demand.

…

But he wasn’t heading for Manila or Paris; they called him back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to one of those secure facilities from which countries fight modern wars. The Radio Research Lab (RRL) at Harvard was a spin-off of MIT’s Radiation Laboratory—confusingly, the latter was nicknamed the Rad Lab, a name that could easily apply to either facility. Leading the charge to militarize American civilian science was Terman adviser and Raytheon cofounder Vannevar Bush, who successfully proposed a National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) to FDR the summer before Japan’s not-so-surprise attack. A collaboration between large defense contractors, New England’s top universities, and the federal government, Bush’s NDRC was the draft outline for the era of Big Science, but first it had to beat the Axis powers.

The Cultural Logic of Computation
by David Golumbia
Published 31 Mar 2009

We might presume from this perspective that linguistic uniformity leads to political harmony, or that political harmony rarely coexists with linguistic diversity—both propositions that can be easily checked historically, and which both arguably lack historical substance to support them. Like Vannevar Bush in his famous article proposing the Memex (Bush 1945), Weaver reflects in large part on the role computers have played in the Allied victory in World War II. Not only is there concern about the tremendous destructive power loosed by the hydrogen bomb, which fully informed Bush’s desire to turn U.S. scientific and engineering prowess toward peaceful ends; there is a related political concern expressed in terms of linguistic diversity which has been exposed by the computational infrastructure used in the service of Allied powers in World War II.

…

The book itself begins with Weaver’s famous, (until-then) privately circulated “memorandum” of 1949, here published as “Translation,” and was circulated among many computer scientists of the time who dissented from its conclusions even then.3 At the time Weaver was president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and tried unsuccessfully to enlist major figures like Norbert Wiener, C. K. Ogden, Ivor Richards, Vannevar Bush, and some others in his project (see Hutchins 1986, 25–27). In contemporary histories we are supposed to see these figures as being short-sighted, but it seems equally plausible that they saw the inherent problems in Weaver’s proposal from the outset. Despite the widespread professional doubt about Weaver’s approach and intuition, his memorandum received a certain amount of public notoriety.

Alone Together
by Sherry Turkle
Published 11 Jan 2011

Because the digital is only ephemeral if you don’t take the trouble to make it permanent. LIFE CAPTURE Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, was concerned about what would happen once the war was over and scientists could dedicate themselves to civilian life. He wasn’t worried about the biologists—they could always work on practical, medical problems—but the physicists needed new direction. In a landmark Atlantic Monthly article, “As We May Think,” Bush suggested one: the physicists should develop a “memex.” This would be “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.”

…

I vividly remember leading an MIT seminar in 2001, one that was part of a celebration at the release of Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, when for the first time, I was the only person in a room of thirty who did not see any issue at all with the prospect of a computer psychotherapist. Moments when big steps with technology seem problematic have a way of passing. EPILOGUE: THE LETTER 1 Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly (July 1945): 101-106, www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush (accessed November 20, 2009). 2 See Steve Mann (with Hal Niedzviecki), Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer (New York: Random House, 2001). 3 C. Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, “A Digital Life,” Scientific American 296, no. 3 (March 2007): 58-65, http://sciam.com/print_version.cfm?

…

For Rhonda, the practice of saving is an end in itself. Don and Rhonda suggest a world in which technology determines what we remember of the story of our lives. Observing software “learns” our “favorites” to customize what it is important to remember. Swaddled in our favorites, we miss out on what was in our peripheral vision. The memex and MyLifeBits both grew out of the idea that technology has developed capacities that should be put to use. There is an implied compact with technology in which we agree not to waste its potential. Kevin Kelly re-frames this understanding in language that gives technology even greater volition: as technology develops, it shows us what it “wants.”

Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier
Published 6 May 2013

PART SEVEN Ted Nelson CHAPTER 18 First Thought, Best Thought First Thought Ted Nelson was the first person to my knowledge to describe, starting in 1960, how you could actually implement new kinds of media in digital form, share them, and collaborate.* Ted was working so early that he couldn’t invoke basic notions like digital images, because computer graphics hadn’t been described yet. (Ivan Sutherland would see to that shortly after.) *In an even earlier article, in 1945, titled “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush hypothesized an advanced microfilm reader, the Memex, which would essentially allow a reader to experience mash-up sequences of microfilm content. But as celebrated and influential as that article was, it did not explore the unique capabilities of digital architectures. Ted’s earliest idea was that instead of reading a text as given originally by the author, a more complex path might be created that uses portions of text to create a new sequence, to create a derivative work, without expunging or losing the original.

…

., 296, 298 lawyers, 98–99, 100, 136, 184, 318–19 leadership, 341–51 legacy prices, 272–75, 288 legal issues, 49, 63, 74–82, 98–99, 100, 104–5, 108, 136, 184, 204, 206, 318–19 Lehman Brothers, 188 lemonade stands, 79–82 “lemons,” 118–19 Lennon, John, 211, 213 levees, economic, 43–45, 46, 47, 48, 49–50, 52, 92, 94, 96, 98, 108, 171, 176n, 224–25, 239–43, 253–54, 263, 345 leveraged mortgages, 49–50, 61, 227, 245, 289n, 296 liberal arts, 97 liberalism, 135–36, 148, 152, 202, 204, 208, 235, 236, 251, 253, 256, 265, 293, 350 libertarianism, 14, 34, 80, 202, 208, 210, 262, 321 liberty, 13–15, 32–33, 90–92, 277–78, 336 licensing agreements, 79–82 “Lifestreams” (Gelernter), 313 Lights in the Tunnel, The (Ford), 56n Linux, 206, 253, 291, 344 litigation, 98–99, 100, 104–5, 108, 184 loans, 32–33, 42, 43, 74, 151–52, 306 local advantages, 64, 94–95, 143–44, 153–56, 173, 203, 280 Local/Global Flip, 153–56, 173, 280 locked-in software, 172–73, 182, 273–74 logical copies, 223 Long-Term Capital Management, 49, 74–75 looms, 22, 23n, 24 loopholes, tax, 77 lotteries, 338–39 lucid dreaming, 162 Luddites, 135, 136 lyres, 22, 23n, 24 machines, 19–20, 86, 92, 123, 129–30, 158, 261, 309–11, 328 see also computers “Machine Stops, The” (Forster), 129–30, 261, 328 machine translations, 19–20 machine vision, 309–11 McMillen, Keith, 117 magic, 110, 115, 151, 178, 216, 338 Malthus, Thomas, 132, 134 Malthusian humor, 125, 127, 132–33 management, 49 manufacturing sector, 49, 85–89, 99, 123, 154, 343 market economies, see economies, market marketing, 211–13, 266–67, 306, 346 “Markets for Lemons” problem, 118–19 Markoff, John, 213 marriage, 167–68, 274–75, 286 Marxism, 15, 22, 37–38, 48, 136–37, 262 as humor, 126 mash-ups, 191, 221, 224–26, 259 Maslow, Abraham, 260, 315 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 75, 93, 94, 96–97, 157–58, 184 mass media, 7, 66, 86, 109, 120, 135, 136, 185–86, 191, 216, 267 material extinction, 125 materialism, 125n, 195 mathematics, 11, 20, 40–41, 70, 71–72, 75–78, 116, 148, 155, 161, 189n, 273n see also statistics Matrix, The, 130, 137, 155 Maxwell, James Clerk, 55 Maxwell’s Demon, 55–56 mechanicals, 49, 51n Mechanical Turk, 177–78, 185, 187, 349 Medicaid, 99 medicine, 11–13, 17, 18, 54, 66–67, 97–106, 131, 132–33, 134, 150, 157–58, 325, 346, 363, 366–67 Meetings with Remarkable Men (Gurdjieff), 215 mega-dossiers, 60 memes, 124 Memex, 221n memories, 131, 312–13, 314 meta-analysis, 112 metaphysics, 12, 127, 139, 193–95 Metcalf’s Law, 169n, 350 Mexico City, 159–62 microfilm, 221n microorganisms, 162 micropayments, 20, 226, 274–75, 286–87, 317, 337–38, 365 Microsoft, 19, 89, 265 Middle Ages, 190 middle class, 2, 3, 9, 11, 16–17, 37–38, 40, 42–45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 60, 74, 79, 91, 92, 95, 98, 171, 205, 208, 210, 224–25, 239–43, 246, 253–54, 259, 262, 263, 280, 291–94, 331, 341n, 344, 345, 347, 354 milling machines, 86 mind reading, 111 Minority Report, 130, 310 Minsky, Marvin, 94, 157–58, 217, 326, 330–31 mission statements, 154–55 Mixed (Augmented) Reality, 312–13, 314, 315 mobile phones, 34n, 39, 85, 87, 162, 172, 182n, 192, 229, 269n, 273, 314, 315, 331 models, economic, 40–41, 148–52, 153, 155–56 modernity, 123–40, 193–94, 255 molds, 86 monetization, 172, 176n, 185, 186, 207, 210, 241–43, 255–56, 258, 260–61, 263, 298, 331, 338, 344–45 money, 3, 21, 29–35, 86, 108, 124, 148, 152, 154, 155, 158, 172, 185, 241–43, 278–79, 284–85, 289, 364 monocultures, 94 monopolies, 60, 65–66, 169–74, 181–82, 187–88, 190, 202, 326, 350 Moondust, 362n Moore’s Law, 9–18, 20, 153, 274–75, 288 morality, 29–34, 35, 42, 50–52, 54, 71–74, 188, 194–95, 252–64, 335–36 Morlocks, 137 morning-after pill, 104 morphing, 162 mortality, 193, 218, 253, 263–64, 325–31, 367 mortgages, 33, 46, 49–52, 61, 78, 95–96, 99, 224, 227, 239, 245, 255, 274n, 289n, 296, 300 motivation, 7–18, 85–86, 97–98, 216 motivational speakers, 216 movies, 111–12, 130, 137, 165, 192, 193, 204, 206, 256, 261–62, 277–78, 310 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 23n MRI, 111n music industry, 11, 18, 22, 23–24, 42, 47–51, 54, 61, 66, 74, 78, 86, 88, 89, 92, 94, 95–96, 97, 129, 132, 134–35, 154, 157, 159–62, 186–87, 192, 206–7, 224, 227, 239, 253, 266–67, 281, 318, 347, 353, 354, 355, 357 Myspace, 180 Nancarrow, Conlon, 159–62 Nancarrow, Yoko, 161 nanopayments, 20, 226, 274–75, 286–87, 317, 337–38, 365 nanorobots, 11, 12, 17 nanotechnology, 11, 12, 17, 87, 162 Napster, 92 narcissism, 153–56, 188, 201 narratives, 165–66, 199 National Security Agency (NSA), 199–200 natural medicine, 131 Nelson, Ted, 128, 221, 228, 245, 349–50 Nelsonian systems, 221–30, 335 Nelson’s humor, 128 Netflix, 192, 223 “net neutrality,” 172 networked cameras, 309–11, 319 networks, see digital networks neutrinos, 110n New Age, 211–17 Newmark, Craig, 177n New Mexico, 159, 203 newspapers, 109, 135, 177n, 225, 284, 285n New York, N.Y., 75, 91, 266–67 New York Times, 109 Nobel Prize, 40, 118, 143n nodes, network, 156, 227, 230, 241–43, 350 “no free lunch” principle, 55–56, 59–60 nondeterministic music, 23n nonlinear solutions, 149–50 nonprofit share sites, 59n, 94–95 nostalgia, 129–32 NRO, 199–200 nuclear power, 133 nuclear weapons, 127, 296 nursing, 97–100, 123, 296n nursing homes, 97–100, 269 Obama, Barack, 79, 100 “Obamacare,” 100n obsolescence, 89, 95 oil resources, 43, 133 online stores, 171 Ono, Yoko, 212 ontologies, 124n, 196 open-source applications, 206, 207, 272, 310–11 optical illusions, 121 optimism, 32–35, 45, 130, 138–40, 218, 230n, 295 optimization, 144–47, 148, 153, 154–55, 167, 202, 203 Oracle, 265 Orbitz, 63, 64, 65 organ donors, 190, 191 ouroboros, 154 outcomes, economic, 40–41, 144–45 outsourcing, 177–78, 185 Owens, Buck, 256 packet switching, 228–29 Palmer, Amanda, 186–87 Pandora, 192 panopticons, 308 papacy, 190 paper money, 34n parallel computers, 147–48, 149, 151 paranoia, 309 Parrish, Maxfield, 214 particle interactions, 196 party machines, 202 Pascal, Blaise, 132, 139 Pascal’s Wager, 139 passwords, 307, 309 “past-oriented money,” 29–31, 35, 284–85 patterns, information, 178, 183, 184, 188–89 Paul, Ron, 33n Pauli exclusion principle, 181, 202 PayPal, 60, 93, 326 peasants, 565 pensions, 95, 99 Perestroika (Kushner), 165 “perfect investments,” 59–67, 77–78 performances, musical, 47–48, 51, 186–87, 253 perpetual motion, 55 Persian Gulf, 86 personal computers (PCs), 158, 182n, 214, 223, 229 personal information systems, 110, 312–16, 317 Pfizer, 265 pharmaceuticals industry, 66–67, 100–106, 123, 136, 203 philanthropy, 117 photography, 53, 89n, 92, 94, 309–11, 318, 319, 321 photo-sharing services, 53 physical trades, 292 physicians, 66–67 physics, 88, 153n, 167n Picasso, Pablo, 108 Pinterest, 180–81, 183 Pirate Party, 49, 199, 206, 226, 253, 284, 318 placebos, 112 placement fees, 184 player pianos, 160–61 plutocracy, 48, 291–94, 355 police, 246, 310, 311, 319–21, 335 politics, 13–18, 21, 22–25, 47–48, 85, 122, 124–26, 128, 134–37, 149–51, 155, 167, 199–234, 295–96, 342 see also conservatism; liberalism; libertarianism Ponzi schemes, 48 Popper, Karl, 189n popular culture, 111–12, 130, 137–38, 139, 159 “populating the stack,” 273 population, 17, 34n, 86, 97–100, 123, 125, 132, 133, 269, 296n, 325–26, 346 poverty, 37–38, 42, 44, 53–54, 93–94, 137, 148, 167, 190, 194, 253, 256, 263, 290, 291–92 power, personal, 13–15, 53, 60, 62–63, 86, 114, 116, 120, 122, 158, 166, 172–73, 175, 190, 199, 204, 207, 208, 278–79, 290, 291, 302–3, 308–9, 314, 319, 326, 344, 360 Presley, Elvis, 211 Priceline, 65 pricing strategies, 1–2, 43, 60–66, 72–74, 145, 147–48, 158, 169–74, 226, 261, 272–75, 289, 317–24, 331, 337–38 printers, 90, 99, 154, 162, 212, 269, 310–11, 316, 331, 347, 348, 349 privacy, 1–2, 11, 13–15, 25, 50–51, 64, 99, 108–9, 114–15, 120–21, 152, 177n, 199–200, 201, 204, 206–7, 234–35, 246, 272, 291, 305, 309–13, 314, 315–16, 317, 319–24 privacy rights, 13–15, 25, 204, 305, 312–13, 314, 315–16, 321–22 product design and development, 85–89, 117–20, 128, 136–37, 145, 154, 236 productivity, 7, 56–57, 134–35 profit margins, 59n, 71–72, 76–78, 94–95, 116, 177n, 178, 179, 207, 258, 274–75, 321–22 progress, 9–18, 20, 21, 37, 43, 48, 57, 88, 98, 123, 124–40, 130–37, 256–57, 267, 325–31, 341–42 promotions, 62 property values, 52 proprietary hardware, 172 provenance, 245–46, 247, 338 pseudo-asceticism, 211–12 public libraries, 293 public roads, 79–80 publishers, 62n, 92, 182, 277–78, 281, 347, 352–60 punishing vs. rewarding network effects, 169–74, 182, 183 quants, 75–76 quantum field theory, 167n, 195 QuNeo, 117, 118, 119 Rabois, Keith, 185 “race to the bottom,” 178 radiant risk, 61–63, 118–19, 120, 156, 183–84 Ragnarok, 30 railroads, 43, 172 Rand, Ayn, 167, 204 randomness, 143 rationality, 144 Reagan, Ronald, 149 real estate, 33, 46, 49–52, 61, 78, 95–96, 99, 193, 224, 227, 239, 245, 255, 274n, 289n, 296, 298, 300, 301 reality, 55–56, 59–60, 124n, 127–28, 154–56, 161, 165–68, 194–95, 203–4, 216–17, 295–303, 364–65 see also Virtual Reality (VR) reason, 195–96 recessions, economic, 31, 54, 60, 76–77, 79, 151–52, 167, 204, 311, 336–37 record labels, 347 recycling, 88, 89 Reddit, 118n, 186, 254 reductionism, 184 regulation, economic, 37–38, 44, 45–46, 49–50, 54, 56, 69–70, 77–78, 266n, 274, 299–300, 311, 321–22, 350–51 relativity theory, 167n religion, 124–25, 126, 131, 139, 190, 193–95, 211–17, 293, 300n, 326 remote computers, 11–12 rents, 144 Republican Party, 79, 202 research and development, 40–45, 85–89, 117–20, 128, 136–37, 145, 154, 215, 229–30, 236 retail sector, 69, 70–74, 95–96, 169–74, 272, 349–51, 355–56 retirement, 49, 150 revenue growth plans, 173n revenues, 149, 149, 150, 151, 173n, 225, 234–35, 242, 347–48 reversible computers, 143n revolutions, 199, 291, 331 rhythm, 159–62 Rich Dad, Poor Dad (Kiyosaki), 46 risk, 54, 55, 57, 59–63, 71–72, 85, 117, 118–19, 120, 156, 170–71, 179, 183–84, 188, 242, 277–81, 284, 337, 350 externalization of, 59n, 117, 277–81 risk aversion, 188 risk pools, 277–81, 284 risk radiation, 61–63, 118–19, 120, 156, 183–84 robo call centers, 177n robotic cars, 90–92 robotics, robots, 11, 12, 17, 23, 42, 55, 85–86, 90–92, 97–100, 111, 129, 135–36, 155, 157, 162, 260, 261, 269, 296n, 342, 359–60 Roman Empire, 24–25 root nodes, 241 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 129 Rousseau humor, 126, 129, 130–31 routers, 171–72 royalties, 47, 240, 254, 263–64, 323, 338 Rubin, Edgar, 121 rupture, 66–67 salaries, 10, 46–47, 50–54, 152, 178, 270–71, 287–88, 291–94, 338–39, 365 sampling, 71–72, 191, 221, 224–26, 259 San Francisco, University of, 190 satellites, 110 savings, 49, 72–74 scalable solutions, 47 scams, 119–21, 186, 275n, 287–88, 299–300 scanned books, 192, 193 SceneTap, 108n Schmidt, Eric, 305n, 352 Schwartz, Peter, 214 science fiction, 18, 126–27, 136, 137–38, 139, 193, 230n, 309, 356n search engines, 51, 60, 70, 81, 120, 191, 267, 289, 293 Second Life, 270, 343 Secret, The (Byrne), 216 securitization, 76–78, 99, 289n security, 14–15, 175, 239–40, 305–8, 345 self-actualization, 211–17 self-driving vehicles, 90–92, 98, 311, 343, 367 servants, 22 servers, 12n, 15, 31, 53–57, 71–72, 95–96, 143–44, 171, 180, 183, 206, 245, 358 see also Siren Servers “Sexy Sadie,” 213 Shakur, Tupac, 329 Shelley, Mary, 327 Short History of Progress, A (Wright), 132 “shrinking markets,” 66–67 shuttles, 22, 23n, 24 signal-processing algorithms, 76–78, 148 silicon chips, 10, 86–87 Silicon Valley, 12, 13, 14, 21, 34n, 56, 59, 60, 66–67, 70, 71, 75–76, 80, 93, 96–97, 100, 102, 108n, 125n, 132, 136, 154, 157, 162, 170, 179–89, 192, 193, 200, 207, 210, 211–18, 228, 230, 233, 258, 275n, 294, 299–300, 325–31, 345, 349, 352, 354–58 singularity, 22–25, 125, 215, 217, 327–28, 366, 367 Singularity University, 193, 325, 327–28 Sirenic Age, 66n, 354 Siren Servers, 53–57, 59, 61–64, 65, 66n, 69–78, 82, 91–99, 114–19, 143–48, 154–56, 166–89, 191, 200, 201, 203, 210n, 216, 235, 246–50, 258, 259, 269, 271, 272, 280, 285, 289, 293–94, 298, 301, 302–3, 307–10, 314–23, 326, 336–51, 354, 365, 366 Siri, 95 skilled labor, 99–100 Skout, 280n Skype, 95, 129 slavery, 22, 23, 33n Sleeper, 130 small businesses, 173 smartphones, 34n, 39, 162, 172, 192, 269n, 273 Smith, Adam, 121, 126 Smolin, Lee, 148n social contract, 20, 49, 247, 284, 288, 335, 336 social engineering, 112–13, 190–91 socialism, 14, 128, 254, 257, 341n social mobility, 66, 97, 292–94 social networks, 18, 51, 56, 60, 70, 81, 89, 107–9, 113, 114, 129, 167–68, 172–73, 179, 180, 190, 199, 200–201, 202, 204, 227, 241, 242–43, 259, 267, 269n, 274–75, 280n, 286, 307–8, 317, 336, 337, 343, 349, 358, 365–66 see also Facebook social safety nets, 10, 44, 54, 202, 251, 293 Social Security, 251, 345 software, 7, 9, 11, 14, 17, 68, 86, 99, 100–101, 128, 129, 147, 154, 155, 165, 172–73, 177–78, 182, 192, 234, 236, 241–42, 258, 262, 273–74, 283, 331, 347, 357 software-mediated technology, 7, 11, 14, 86, 100–101, 165, 234, 236, 258, 347 South Korea, 133 Soviet Union, 70 “space elevator pitch,” 233, 342, 361 space travel, 233, 266 Spain, 159–60 spam, 178, 275n spending levels, 287–88 spirituality, 126, 211–17, 325–31, 364 spreadsheet programs, 230 “spy data tax,” 234–35 Square, 185 Stalin, Joseph, 125n Stanford Research Institute (SRI), 215 Stanford University, 60, 75, 90, 95, 97, 101, 102, 103, 162, 325 Starr, Ringo, 256 Star Trek, 138, 139, 230n startup companies, 39, 60, 69, 93–94, 108n, 124n, 136, 179–89, 265, 274n, 279–80, 309–10, 326, 341, 343–45, 348, 352, 355 starvation, 123 Star Wars, 137 star (winner-take-all) system, 38–43, 50, 54–55, 204, 243, 256–57, 263, 329–30 statistics, 11, 20, 71–72, 75–78, 90–91, 93, 110n, 114–15, 186, 192 “stickiness,” 170, 171 stimulus, economic, 151–52 stoplights, 90 Strangelove humor, 127 student debt, 92, 95 “Study 27,” 160 “Study 36,” 160 Sumer, 29 supergoop, 85–89 supernatural phenomena, 55, 124–25, 127, 132, 192, 194–95, 300 supply chain, 70–72, 174, 187 Supreme Court, U.S., 104–5 surgery, 11–13, 17, 18, 98, 157–58, 363 surveillance, 1–2, 11, 14, 50–51, 64, 71–72, 99, 108–9, 114–15, 120–21, 152, 177n, 199–200, 201, 206–7, 234–35, 246, 272, 291, 305, 309–11, 315, 316, 317, 319–24 Surviving Progress, 132 sustainable economies, 235–37, 285–87 Sutherland, Ivan, 221 swarms, 99, 109 synthesizers, 160 synthetic biology, 162 tablets, 85, 86, 87, 88, 113, 162, 229 Tahrir Square, 95 Tamagotchis, 98 target ads, 170 taxation, 44, 45, 49, 52, 60, 74–75, 77, 82, 149, 149, 150, 151, 202, 210, 234–35, 263, 273, 289–90 taxis, 44, 91–92, 239, 240, 266–67, 269, 273, 311 Teamsters, 91 TechCrunch, 189 tech fixes, 295–96 technical schools, 96–97 technologists (“techies”), 9–10, 15–16, 45, 47–48, 66–67, 88, 122, 124, 131–32, 134, 139–40, 157–62, 165–66, 178, 193–94, 295–98, 307, 309, 325–31, 341, 342, 356n technology: author’s experience in, 47–48, 62n, 69–72, 93–94, 114, 130, 131–32, 153, 158–62, 178, 206–7, 228, 265, 266–67, 309–10, 325, 328, 343, 352–53, 362n, 364, 365n, 366 bio-, 11–13, 17, 18, 109–10, 162, 330–31 chaos and, 165–66, 273n, 331 collusion in, 65–66, 72, 169–74, 255, 350–51 complexity of, 53–54 costs of, 8, 18, 72–74, 87n, 136–37, 170–71, 176–77, 184–85 creepiness of, 305–24 cultural impact of, 8–9, 21, 23–25, 53, 130, 135–40 development and emergence of, 7–18, 21, 53–54, 60–61, 66–67, 85–86, 87, 97–98, 129–38, 157–58, 182, 188–90, 193–96, 217 digital, 2–3, 7–8, 15–16, 18, 31, 40, 43, 50–51, 132, 208 economic impact of, 1–3, 15–18, 29–30, 37, 40, 53–54, 60–66, 71–74, 79–110, 124, 134–37, 161, 162, 169–77, 181–82, 183, 184–85, 218, 254, 277–78, 298, 335–39, 341–51, 357–58 educational, 92–97 efficiency of, 90, 118, 191 employment in, 56–57, 60, 71–74, 79, 123, 135, 178 engineering for, 113–14, 123–24, 192, 194, 217, 218, 326 essential vs. worthless, 11–12 failure of, 188–89 fear of (technophobia), 129–32, 134–38 freedom as issue in, 32–33, 90–92, 277–78, 336 government influence in, 158, 199, 205–6, 234–35, 240, 246, 248–51, 307, 317, 341, 345–46, 350–51 human agency and, 8–21, 50–52, 85, 88, 91, 124–40, 144, 165–66, 175–78, 191–92, 193, 217, 253–64, 274–75, 283–85, 305–6, 328, 341–51, 358–60, 361, 362, 365–67 ideas for, 123, 124, 158, 188–89, 225, 245–46, 286–87, 299, 358–60 industrial, 49, 83, 85–89, 123, 132, 154, 343 information, 7, 32–35, 49, 66n, 71–72, 109, 110, 116, 120, 125n, 126, 135, 136, 254, 312–16, 317 investment in, 66, 181, 183, 184, 218, 277–78, 298, 348 limitations of, 157–62, 196, 222 monopolies for, 60, 65–66, 169–74, 181–82, 187–88, 190, 202, 326, 350 morality and, 50–51, 72, 73–74, 188, 194–95, 262, 335–36 motivation and, 7–18, 85–86, 97–98, 216 nano-, 11, 12, 17, 162 new vs. old, 20–21 obsolescence of, 89, 97 political impact of, 13–18, 22–25, 85, 122, 124–26, 128, 134–37, 199–234, 295–96, 342 progress in, 9–18, 20, 21, 37, 43, 48, 57, 88, 98, 123, 124–40, 130–37, 256–57, 267, 325–31, 341–42 resources for, 55–56, 157–58 rupture as concept in, 66–67 scams in, 119–21, 186, 275n, 287–88, 299–300 singularity of, 22–25, 125, 215, 217, 327–28, 366, 367 social impact of, 9–21, 124–40, 167n, 187, 280–81, 310–11 software-mediated, 7, 11, 14, 86, 100–101, 165, 234, 236, 258, 347 startup companies in, 39, 60, 69, 93–94, 108n, 124n, 136, 179–89, 265, 274n, 279–80, 309–10, 326, 341, 343–45, 348, 352, 355 utopian, 13–18, 21, 31, 37–38, 45–46, 96, 128, 130, 167, 205, 207, 265, 267, 270, 283, 290, 291, 308–9, 316 see also specific technologies technophobia, 129–32, 134–38 television, 86, 185–86, 191, 216, 267 temperature, 56, 145 Ten Commandments, 300n Terminator, The, 137 terrorism, 133, 200 Tesla, Nikola, 327 Texas, 203 text, 162, 352–60 textile industry, 22, 23n, 24, 135 theocracy, 194–95 Theocracy humor, 124–25 thermodynamics, 88, 143n Thiel, Peter, 60, 93, 326 thought experiments, 55, 139 thought schemas, 13 3D printers, 7, 85–89, 90, 99, 154, 162, 212, 269, 310–11, 316, 331, 347, 348, 349 Thrun, Sebastian, 94 Tibet, 214 Time Machine, The (Wells), 127, 137, 261, 331 topology, network, 241–43, 246 touchscreens, 86 tourism, 79 Toyota Prius, 302 tracking services, 109, 120–21, 122 trade, 29 traffic, 90–92, 314 “tragedy of the commons,” 66n Transformers, 98 translation services, 19–20, 182, 191, 195, 261, 262, 284, 338 transparency, 63–66, 74–78, 118, 176, 190–91, 205–6, 278, 291, 306–9, 316, 336 transportation, 79–80, 87, 90–92, 123, 258 travel agents, 64 Travelocity, 65 travel sites, 63, 64, 65, 181, 279–80 tree-shaped networks, 241–42, 243, 246 tribal dramas, 126 trickle-down effect, 148–49, 204 triumphalism, 128, 157–62 tropes (humors), 124–40, 157, 170, 230 trust, 32–34, 35, 42, 51–52 Turing, Alan, 127–28, 134 Turing’s humor, 127–28, 191–94 Turing Test, 330 Twitter, 128, 173n, 180, 182, 188, 199, 200n, 201, 204, 245, 258, 259, 349, 365n 2001: A Space Odyssey, 137 two-way links, 1–2, 227, 245, 289 underemployment, 257–58 unemployment, 7–8, 22, 79, 85–106, 117, 151–52, 234, 257–58, 321–22, 331, 343 “unintentional manipulation,” 144 United States, 25, 45, 54, 79–80, 86, 138, 199–204 universities, 92–97 upper class, 45, 48 used car market, 118–19 user interface, 362–63, 364 utopianism, 13–18, 21, 30, 31, 37–38, 45–46, 96, 128, 130, 167, 205, 207, 265, 267, 270, 283, 290, 291, 308–9, 316 value, economic, 21, 33–35, 52, 61, 64–67, 73n, 108, 283–90, 299–300, 321–22, 364 value, information, 1–3, 15–16, 20, 210, 235–43, 257–58, 259, 261–63, 271–75, 321–24, 358–60 Values, Attitudes, and Lifestyles (VALS), 215 variables, 149–50 vendors, 71–74 venture capital, 66, 181, 218, 277–78, 298, 348 videos, 60, 100, 162, 185–86, 204, 223, 225, 226, 239, 240, 242, 245, 277, 287, 329, 335–36, 349, 354, 356 Vietnam War, 353n vinyl records, 89 viral videos, 185–86 Virtual Reality (VR), 12, 47–48, 127, 129, 132, 158, 162, 214, 283–85, 312–13, 314, 315, 325, 343, 356, 362n viruses, 132–33 visibility, 184, 185–86, 234, 355 visual cognition, 111–12 VitaBop, 100–106, 284n vitamins, 100–106 Voice, The, 185–86 “voodoo economics,” 149 voting, 122, 202–4, 249 Wachowski, Lana, 165 Wall Street, 49, 70, 76–77, 181, 184, 234, 317, 331, 350 Wal-Mart, 69, 70–74, 89, 174, 187, 201 Warhol, Andy, 108 War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 137 water supplies, 17, 18 Watts, Alan, 211–12 Wave, 189 wealth: aggregate or concentration of, 9, 42–43, 53, 60, 61, 74–75, 96, 97, 108, 115, 148, 157–58, 166, 175, 201, 202, 208, 234, 278–79, 298, 305, 335, 355, 360 creation of, 32, 33–34, 46–47, 50–51, 57, 62–63, 79, 92, 96, 120, 148–49, 210, 241–43, 270–75, 291–94, 338–39, 349 inequalities and redistribution of, 20, 37–45, 65–66, 92, 97, 144, 254, 256–57, 274–75, 286–87, 290–94, 298, 299–300 see also income levels weather forecasting, 110, 120, 150 weaving, 22, 23n, 24 webcams, 99, 245 websites, 80, 170, 200, 201, 343 Wells, H.

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

America excelled in three things: producing these different worlds in the first place; bringing them together in creative symbiosis; and then commercializing the ideas that they produced. We have already seen how Vannevar Bush played a central role in forging America’s unique military-industrial-academic complex. Bush was particularly keen on information technology. He founded Raytheon, a leading electronics company. He even published an essay in 1945 conjuring up the possibility of a personal computer—he called it a “memex”—that could store all your personal information, books, letters, files, records, whatever, in a single space, as a sort of enlarged “intimate supplement” to your memory.10 The military-industrial complex directed unprecedented resources into IT either directly, by doing its own research, or, more often, indirectly, by funding academic research.

…

America also awarded research grants on the basis of competitive bids rather than bureaucratic influence. The United States led the rest of the world in its investment in “big science.” The man who did more than anybody else to convert the political establishment to the idea that science was a vital economic input rather than an expensive luxury was Vannevar Bush. Bush united the three worlds at the heart of what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex: he was a sometime dean of engineering at MIT; the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, in charge of six thousand scientists, during the war; and the founder of a science company, Raytheon.

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization
by K. Eric Drexler
Published 6 May 2013

By that time, each of these capabilities would have seemed possible—indeed, most already existed, though enabled by different technologies: Music-makers without musical instruments—Phonographs. Printers without pieces of metal type—Offset lithography. Instant mail across miles—Telegraphs and teletype machines. Transoceanic conversations—Cables and telephones. Movies at home—Movie projectors. And a library’s journals, available on demand? In the closing months of World War II, Vannevar Bush proposed a desk-scale machine to retrieve images of pages stored on microfilm. If such a machine had been built to hold data on a library scale, however, its cost would have been enormous. For each of these capabilities, then, the conceptual sticking point wasn’t the ends, but the means; not the idea of broad progress, but the form this progress would take and how far-reaching it would be.

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xiMuch of the most important research is seldom called “nanotechnology”: Chapter 12 surveys the status and rapid progress in the technologies of atomic precision, while the following chapter tells the story of how atomic precision and (federally funded) nanotechnology diverged. Chapter 1: Atoms, Bits, and Radical Abundance 5to retrieve images of pages stored on microfilm: Bush’s proposed “memex” system would have been more than that, however; he proposed what amounted to a pre-digital version of a hypertext system. 7In mechanically guided chemical processes: Appendix I discusses the physical principles and requirements. Chapter 2: An Early Journey of Ideas 9a scientific paper I published in 1981: Cited in the main text and available at www.pnas.org/content/78/9/5275.full.pdf+html.

Reset
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 14 Aug 2020

The concept has a long history dating back at least to the time of the printing press and accelerated by the advent of radio, television, and other modes of communication.147 It has its modern genesis in the mid twentieth-century research of American engineer Vannevar Bush, who was concerned about data deluge and how it would impede rational exploration of problems. The concept is closely tied to a particular view of the human mind as an information processing machine, then just gaining widespread acceptance. Ironically, the solutions Bush and others proposed to mitigate information overload may have led to some of the very technologies that would evolve into social media. For example, in 1945 Bush proposed a “memex” machine, an imagined personal device used to access information and build connections among disparate bits of data.

Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World
by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg
Published 15 Nov 2010

For example, Figure 13.5 depicts a semantic network hand-drawn by Douglas Hofstadter to illustrate the relationships among some of the many interlocking concepts in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach [217]. Vannevar Bush and the Memex. Thus, information networks date back into much earlier periods in our history; for centuries, they were associated with libraries and scholarly literature, rather than with computer technology and the Internet. The idea that they could assume a strongly technological incarnation, in the form of something like the Web, is generally credited to Vannevar Bush and his seminal 1945 article in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled “As We May Think” [88]. Written at the end of World War II, it imagined with eerie prescience the ways in which nascent computing and communication technology might revolutionize the ways we store, exchange, and access information.

…

Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition. Harvard University Press, 1992. [86] Ronald S. Burt. The network structure of social capital. Research in Organizational Studies, 22:345–423, 2000. [87] Ronald S. Burt. Structural holes and good ideas. American Journal of Sociology, 110(2):349–99, September 2004. [88] Vannevar Bush. As we may think. Atlantic Monthly, 176(1):101–108, July 1945. [89] Vincent Buskens and Arnout van de Rijt. Dynamics of networks if everyone strives for structural holes. American Journal of Sociology, 114(2):371–407, 2009. [90] Samuel R. Buss and Peter Clote. Solving the Fisher-Wright and coalescence problems with a discrete Markov chain analysis.

…

Our conscious experience of thinking, on the other hand, exhibits what might be called an associative memory, the kind that a semantic network represents — you think of one thing; it reminds you of another; you see a novel connection; some new insight is formed. Bush therefore called for the creation of information systems that mimicked this style of memory; he imagined a hypothetical prototype called the Memex that functioned very much like the Web, consisting of digitized versions of all human knowledge connected by associative links, and he imagined a range of commercial applications and knowledge-sharing activities that could take place around such a device. In this way, Bush’s article foreshadowed not only the Web itself, but also many of the dominant metaphors that 13.2.

User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play
by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant
Published 7 Nov 2019

Engelbart finally found his calling in a thatched hut that the Red Cross had made into a makeshift reading library. Flipping through an issue of Life, he came upon a summary of a now-famous essay in The Atlantic by Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think.” In it, Bush pointed out that scientific researchers were being swamped by the data and information available to them. While mankind had spent thousands of years creating tools for changing the physical world, Bush argued, it was now time to create knowledge tools. He proposed several, including one he hastily dubbed the memex, which would allow a person to store every book or communication he’d ever need, and call it up with “exceeding speed and flexibility.”

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 29 Sep 2013

Cybernetic thinking inspired new directions in engineering, biology, neuroscience, organizational studies, and sociology. Cybernetics underpinned the plotline for Foundation, but advances in computing provided the props. Just weeks before the 1945 American nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vannevar Bush published a seminal article in The Atlantic that laid out a road map for the computer age. Bush was a technological authority without equal, an MIT man who during World War II had directed the entire US scientific effort, including the Manhattan Project that developed the nuclear weapons used against Japan.

…

A mathematician, he wrote, “is primarily an individual who is skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane. . . . All else he should be able to turn over to his mechanism, just as confidently as he turns over the propelling of his car to the intricate mechanism under the hood.” The essay is often cited for its description of a hypothetical device Bush called the “memex,” a startlingly prescient depiction of the Web browser. But Bush also foresaw the application of computers to understanding entire societies. “There will always be plenty of things to compute,” he wrote, “in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things.”49 Cybernetics provided a theoretical wrapper for the more mundane field of operations research, which also grew out of wartime planning and applied the new science of systems to the simulation and planning of large organizations.

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Jun 2009

In contradiction to popular mythology about them, these researchers had less allegiance to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. military than they did to the pure pursuit of knowledge and the expansion of human capabilities. Although their budgets may have come partly from the Pentagon, their aims were decidedly nonmilitary As seminal essays by World War II technologists Vannevar Bush, Norbert Wiener, and J.C.R. Licklider made clear, the job before them was to convert a wartime technology industry into a peacetime leap forward for humanity. Bush, FDR’s former war advisor, wrote of a hypothetical computer or “Memex” machine he intended as an extension of human memory. Wiener, the founder of “cybernetics,” believed that lessons in feedback learned by the Air Force during the war could be applied to a vast range of technologies, giving machines the ability to extend the senses and abilities of real people.

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism
by Bhu Srinivasan
Published 25 Sep 2017

At the end of World War II, Vannevar Bush, the wartime director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, published an article in the Atlantic Monthly titled “As We May Think.” Bush had overseen thousands of scientists rapidly applying science to warfare, and he feared the loss of billions of dollars’ worth of findings. He pointed out how “Mendel’s concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation” because the right people could not access it and asserted that “this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us.” He proposed a theoretical system he called “Memex” to create a new kind of cataloging system “ready made with a mesh of associate trails running through them.”

…

“sprawling computer grid”: Philip Elmer-Dewitt, “Take a Trip into the Future on the Electronic Superhighway,” Time, April 12, 1993. “the human mind”: Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (San Francisco: Harper, 1999), 3. “Mendel’s concept of”: Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic, July 1943. “poet, philosopher, and rogue”: Theodor Holm Nelson, “My Life and Work, Very Brief,” Hyperland.com. coined the term: T. H. Nelson, “Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate,” ACM ’65 Proceedings of the 1965 20th National Conference, August 24, 1965, 84–100.

Americana
by Bhu Srinivasan

At the end of World War II, Vannevar Bush, the wartime director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, published an article in the Atlantic Monthly titled “As We May Think.” Bush had overseen thousands of scientists rapidly applying science to warfare, and he feared the loss of billions of dollars’ worth of findings. He pointed out how “Mendel’s concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation” because the right people could not access it and asserted that “this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us.” He proposed a theoretical system he called “Memex” to create a new kind of cataloging system “ready made with a mesh of associate trails running through them.”

…

“sprawling computer grid”: Philip Elmer-Dewitt, “Take a Trip into the Future on the Electronic Superhighway,” Time, April 12, 1993. “the human mind”: Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (San Francisco: Harper, 1999), 3. “Mendel’s concept of”: Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic, July 1943. “poet, philosopher, and rogue”: Theodor Holm Nelson, “My Life and Work, Very Brief,” Hyperland.com. coined the term: T. H. Nelson, “Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate,” ACM ’65 Proceedings of the 1965 20th National Conference, August 24, 1965, 84–100.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 15 Nov 2013

Internet theorists looking at, say, MP3 technology will think “Napster”—that quintessential “Internet technology”—and start their account from the mid-1990s; post-Internet theorists looking at MP3 technology will think of the history of sound compression and start their account in the 1910s (as Jonathan Sterne has done in his recent MP3: The Meaning of a Format). Internet theorists studying search engines will begin with Stanford and Google perhaps, with a cursory mention of Vannevar Bush’s memex; post-Internet theorists will look much further back than that, unearthing such obscure figures as Albert Kahn (and his effort to create “The Archives of the Planet” through photographs), as well as Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine with their Mundaneum, an attempt to gather all the world’s knowledge.