Vannevar Bush

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext

by Belinda Barnet  · 14 Jul 2013  · 193pp  · 19,478 words

in Bardini 2000, xiv). I have had the great privilege of meeting many of the people you will read about in these pages – except for Vannevar Bush, who died in 1974 – the colourful anecdotes, magical visions and prescient ideas you will find here have come directly from them or from their

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roam around Brown University gathering documents and stories from Andries van Dam and the Hypertext Editing System (HES) team; time to rummage through the Vannevar Bush archives at the Library of Congress looking for interesting correspondence; time to interview Doug Engelbart and feel embarrassingly starstruck; and time to travel to Keio

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(ISR) at Swinburne was instrumental in bringing Ted Nelson to Australia. Many of these chapters first appeared as articles in academic journals. Chapter 2, on Vannevar Bush and Memex, and Chapter 5, on HES and FRESS, were adapted from articles that first appeared in the DHQ. Chapter 3, on Xanadu, was adapted from

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retroactivity’; technical designs can reappear, incorporate new bits and pieces from whatever is around at the time (microfilm, for example, was the newfangled thing in Vannevar Bush’s era, and digital computing in Doug Engelbart’s era) and then rapidly evolve in a single generation. [Virtually] all permutations and combinations were possible

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in Chapter 3, when discussing Douglas Engelbart’s NLS system. NLS was the computing world’s most influential prototype, yet it was inspired by Vannevar Bush’s vision of Memex. Engelbart updated this design with digital computing technologies. Chapter 4 is on Nelson’s Xanadu, which has never been built in its entirety

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and prototypes, as I demonstrate, have had an influence over the evolution of hypertext qua material artefact. We begin where Doug Engelbart began, with Vannevar Bush’s memory extender or Memex. As the reader will discover, this has become the oldest image of potentiality for hypertext. Chapter 2

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taught this man any part of the subject of differential equations; but in building that machine, managing it, he learned what differential 16 Memory Machines Vannevar Bush seated at a desk. This portrait is credited to ‘OEM Defense’, the Office for Emergency Management during World War II. It was probably taken

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it through different information domains […] I was designing all kinds of things you might want to do if you had a system like the one Vannevar Bush had suggested. (Engelbart cited in Rheingold 1985, 177) Another technology that Engelbart transferred to the design was a device based on the planimeter. The

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tangle of the real world and its burgeoning mass of information; we need an alternative paradigm. The computer world could be so much better. Like Vannevar Bush and Douglas Engelbart (a close friend), Nelson also has a theory about the inheritance and transmission of human knowledge. The knowledge that we pass

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system as the ELF ties in better than anything previously used with the actual processes by which thought is progressively organized. (Nelson 1965, 97) Like Vannevar Bush before him, Nelson seeks a defense against loss – in particular, information loss. We are what we can remember, and we remember best when information

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excerpt from Nelson’s 1965 paper: [The idea of links in NLS was] by no means new. To go back only as far as 1945, Vannevar Bush, in his famous article ‘As We May Think’ describes a system of this type […] Bush stressed his file’s ability to store related materials

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These parts are reusable in the same document, but most important, they are reusable by reference outside of the document. Interestingly, Nelson points out that Vannevar Bush’s Memex actually used transclusions: ‘He created a new trail on which you put things that were on old trails’ (Nelson 2011). This approach is more

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the course proceeded, prompting further response and debate in the manner of contemporary teaching webs and wikis (the term ‘web’ was used in accordance with Vannevar Bush’s understanding of the term as a cluster of trails (Bush [1945] 1991)). It was the first time hypertext had been used as a

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earlier models of the hypertext concept, and in the process, demonstrated that every model has its benefits and its shortcomings. We began with Vannevar Bush’s memory extender, or Memex. Memex was an analogue machine that would store information associatively, keep a record of all the interconnections between ideas, but never forget things. The

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Boon, Marcus. 2011. In Praise of Copying. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burke, Colin. 1991. ‘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

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) 1991. ‘The Inscrutable “Thirties”’. In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, edited by James Nyce and Paul Kahn,

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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

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We May Think’. In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, edited by James Nyce and Paul Kahn, 85–112. London

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: 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

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to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, edited by James Nyce and

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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. New York: William

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Phyletic Gradualism’. In Time Frames, edited by N. Eldredge, 193–223. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Engelbart, Douglas. 1962a. ‘Letter to Vannevar Bush and Program on Human Effectiveness’. In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, edited by James Nyce and Paul Kahn, 235–44. London: Academic Press. . 1962b. ‘Augmenting Human Intellect

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/meme3-01.html (accessed April 2013). . 1998. ‘The Strategic Pursuit of Collective IQ’. Paper presented at The Brown/ MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium, 12 October. Online: http://www.cs.brown.edu/ memex/Bush_Symposium.html (accessed March 2012). . 2002. Doug Engelbart Institute. Online: http://www.dougengelbart.org/history/pix. html (accessed April 2013).

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an ObjectOriented Hypermedia System and Applications Framework’. ACM SIGPLAN Notices 21, no. 11: 106–201. . 1991. ‘Hypertext: Does It Reduce Cholesterol, Too?’ In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, edited by James Nyce and Paul Kahn, 287–318. London: Academic Press. Mindell, David A. 2000. ‘MIT Differential Analyzer

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20SET%2003.11.06/hin68.tif (accessed June 2012). . 1987. Computer Lib/Dream Machines. Redmond: Microsoft Press. . 1991. ‘As We Will Think’. In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, edited by James Nyce and Paul Kahn, 245—60. London: Academic Press. . 1993. Literary Machines. Sausalito: Mindful Press. . 1995a

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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

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. London: Academic Press. Owens, Larry. 1991. ‘Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer: The Text and Context of an Early

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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

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Renear, Elli Mylonas and Andries van Dam. 1998. ‘50 Years After “As We May Think”’. Paper presented at the Brown/MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium, October 12. Online: http://www.cs.brown.edu/memex/Bush_ Symposium.html (accessed March 2012). Smith, John B., Stephen F. Weiss, Gordon J. Ferguson, Jay David Bolter, Marcy

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Professionals’. Technical Report 86-025, August. Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Smith, Linda C. 1991. ‘Memex as an Image of Potentiality Revisited’. In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, edited by James Nyce and Paul Kahn, 261–86. London: Academic Press. Spa, Deborah L

The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal

by M. Mitchell Waldrop  · 14 Apr 2001

-1920s, when his wanderings through the MIT campus had led him to the electrical engineering department and a professor there named Vannevar Bush. CHAPTER 2 THE LAST TRANSITION ......, I . , 'q. fit - -- Actually, Vannevar Bush would have been a hard man to miss. He was only in his midthirties when Norbert Wiener first encountered him

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same pink-collar connotation as typist). The building of computing machinery was, by extension, a job for mere tinkerers. The greatest apparatus man in America: Vannevar Bush contemplates the Differential Analyzer THE LAST TRANSITION 25 Wiener, however, was among the few great mathematicians who had actually worked as computers, and his patriotic

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Wiener: here was a device that was purely mechanical yet could carry out a task that seemed to embody intelligence itself. And now here was Vannevar Bush, taking that automation to a whole new level. For Bush, the inspiration had come early in the 1920s, when he tackled one of the most

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-five thousand dollars in seed money for the new center. And by that point, it was clear that the project would have to proceed without Vannevar Bush at the helm. Just as the money was arriving at MIT, Bush was leaving. In truth, Bush had become increasingly distracted from his computer work

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German army marched into Paris. A MEMO TO VANNEVAR Norbert Wiener wasted no time. Indeed, he'd felt the coming crisis even more keenly than Vannevar Bush had. For years now, he'd found the Nazi persecution of his fellow Jews in Europe to be the stuff of nightmares-literally: at one

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had been built for. Furthermore, it seemed as though all-electronic machines such as the Rockefeller Analyzer would only increase that speed. Better yet, for Vannevar Bush and for many others, was that analog machines had a wonderfully evocative quality. They didn't just calculate an answer; they in- vited you to

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yet before anyone even demonstrated a programmable digital computer). But one of the biggest single steps in that direction had already been taken-thanks to Vannevar Bush's own Differential Analyzer. Actually, all Bush had been looking for was a bright young electrical engineering graduate who would be willing to work his

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transistors etched on silicon. But thanks to Shannon, microchip designers still talk and think in terms of a device's internal logic. Of course, neither Vannevar Bush nor anyone else had any way of recogniz- ing all this in 1937. And in truth, the immediate impact of Shannon's work was remarkably

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now con- vinced: binary math was the future of computing. Indeed, the Dartmouth pres- entation may have been what inspired the memo he sent to Vannevar Bush only a few weeks later. From mechanical to electromechanical to fully electronic. Wiener's emphasis on high-speed electronics in that memo certainly didn't

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number-crunching demands being placed on them. In January 1944, von Neumann had accordingly written to Warren Weaver, the head of applied-mathematics research at Vannevar Bush's National Defense Research Council: Who is working on high-speed automatic computing ma- chines? he asked. Weaver had given him three contacts: Howard Aiken

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of unexpected in- sights set in motion by his old friend Norbert Wiener. However miffed Wiener may have been in the autumn of 1940, when Vannevar Bush rejected his "impractical" computer proposal, he certainly hadn't let it keep him out of war research. Within weeks, in fact, Wiener was already deep

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in the Ph.D. program in mathematics at MIT and casting about for a suitable thesis topic. "Off and on," he wrote to his mentor Vannevar Bush on February 16, 1939, "I have been working on an analysis of some of the fun- damental properties of general systems for the transmission of

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broader concept of message in all its aspects, then yes, Wiener had been immersed in the field since the 1920s. His inspiration had come from Vannevar Bush, who'd explained to him that electrical engineering actually embraced two separate disciplines: power engi- neering, where the goal was to optimize the flow of

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in the world who could make Lick visibly lose his temper. In fairness, Dean Burchard was a distinguished architectural historian who had ably served in Vannevar Bush's NDRC during the war and done yeoman's work afterward in reorganizing and modernizing MIT's library system. Miller remembers him as a pleasant

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of test data, scheduling routine maintenance, planning for continual evolution and growth- and on and on. Here Lick may have been thinking ofVannevar Bush's Memex, which he had heard about by the late 1950s, even though he hadn't yet read Bush's original ar- ticle. Certainly he saw the

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feel a bit insulted by the invitation; de- spite his inclusion on the impressively heavyweight roster of participants, which ranged from C. P. Snow to Vannevar Bush, he couldn't help but notice that he'd been asked to fill in only after someone else had taken ill. "I was not considered

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comic novel The Egg and I, he had come across an article entitled "As We May Think." Of course! Engelbart hadn't thought about Vannevar Bush's Memex in years. But now that he had, he could see that it was just a matter of replacing Bush's microfilm with modern computers. The

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of Texas. But what really grabbed him was the article itself He knew a little some- thing about computers. He'd even read Vannevar Bush's article about the Memex, and Norbert Wiener's The Human Use of Human Beings. But interactive computers? Networks of computers? Humans in symbiosis with computers? The idea

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its subheadings as a unit; automatically num- ber the headings; and so on. It also implemented what would later come to be known as hyperlinks, Vannevar Bush's old notion of user-defined associations between one written concept and another. And for those situations where users wanted something that wasn't already

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circuit would be in ten years. But you couldn't predict with any accuracy what you could do with it." That was what people like Vannevar Bush, J. C. R. Licklider, Wes Clark, and Doug Engelbart had always perceived so well, he thought. The real significance of computing was to be found

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your own machine was not a big leap." Indeed, Wes Clark had made that leap a long time before-as had Lick, Engel- bart, and Vannevar Bush in their own ways, and no doubt many others as well. Even so, this notion of individual small computers wasn't one that Taylor wanted

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let his people function as a kind of self-exciting system. As Stu Card remembers it, "There was this thread of ideas that led from Vannevar Bush through J. C. R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Alan Kay-a thread in the Ascent of Man. It was like the Holy Grail

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Ted Nelson, an independently wealthy computer activist who had declared that "hypertext" -a word he'd invented to describe the electronic links first imagined by Vannevar Bush-would at last allow us to break free from linear thought and hierarchical power structures. The ARPA vi- sion of personal involvement with computers had

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playing with the idea of hypertext for a full decade by that point, having independently reinvented the idea long be- fore he ever heard of Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, or, for that matter, the Internet itself; his first implementation, in 1980, had been a kind of free-forn1 database that

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LAST TRANSITION 1. 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

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. 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

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Kahn, "A Machine for the Mind: Vannevar Bush's Memex," In

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Press, 1985), 4: 134. 7. Wiener, I Am a MathematiCIan, 239. 8. Qyoted In Larry Owens, "Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer: The Text and Context of an Early Computer," In Nyce and Kahn, eds., From Memex to Hypertext, 23-24. 9. Claude Shannon, "A Symbolic AnalysIs of Relay and Switching ClfCUltS" (1938

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Computing 11, no. 3 (1989). Brooks, Frederick P., Jr. The MythIcal Man-Month. Reading, Mass.: 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

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. -. 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

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). 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. Campbell-Kelly, Martin, and William Aspray

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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

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of Computer Time-Shanng." IEEE Annals of the HIStory ofComputzng 17, no. 2 (1995). Owens, Larry. "Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer: The Text and Context of an Early Com- puter." In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind's Machine, edited by James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn. San Diego: Academic Press

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, 1961. Wiesner, Jerome B. "The CommunICations Sciences-Those Early Days." In R. L. E.: 1946 + 20. Cam- bridge, Mass.: Research Laboratory for Electronics, MIT, 1966. -. "Vannevar Bush, March 11, 1890-June 28, 1974." In Biographzcal Memoirs, vol. 50. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1979. -. "Memories of Lick." Speech delivered at

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. T. zn Perspective: A Pzctonal H15tory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Boston: Little, Brown, 1975. Zachary, G. Pascal. "Vannevar Bush Backs the Bomb." Bulletin of the Atomic SCIentists, December 1992. -. Endless Frontzer: Vannevar Bush, Engzneer of the Amencan Century. Cambndge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. Zuse, Konrad. "Some Remarks on the History of Computing

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science)

by Thierry Bardini  · 1 Dec 2000

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

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], 101-2) Some critics realized very early, however, that relying on such an individual process could create problems. For instance, in a private letter to Vannevar Bush sent on August 27, 1945, immediately after "As We May Think" ap- peared, John H. Weakland offered two main objections: "( I) Wouldn't the fact

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years ago hadn't had a real influence upon the course of my thoughts and actions. (Reprinted in Nyce and Kahn I99 Ia , 235-36) Vannevar Bush was the founding father of the community of experts within the large-scale military and civilian organizations that grew out of World 42 Language and

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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

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essentially different from the light-pen stylus developed on the East Coast. The tablet's design, its developers claimed, was closer to what Vannevar Bush had in mind for his Memex machine. But they also saw it as an improvement on the original Sketchpad concept. In the first report on the device, "The

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- pIng motion due to the variation of the generating line. (1965 [1855], quoted in Goldstine I97 2 , 40-43) 98 The Invention of the Mouse Vannevar Bush had experimented with the principle of the planimeter in his 1913 master's thesis at Tufts College. He used a disc integrator as the key

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needed faIrly sImple programs for word processing and page layout. . . . The paLOS applIcatIon were modeled after NLS, which in turn was based on the [Vannevar] Bush paper [Memex]. They were really tools for organIzing thought, not for editing and page design. WhIle the word-processing functions were there, there was also lots of

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now very often considered as the pre- cursor of today's hypermedia, the original application in computerized systems of the principle of hypertext envisioned by Vannevar Bush. (See, for example, Berners-Lee 1997, 58). The World Wide Web is the 1990's implementation of the 1980's science fiction representation of cyberspace

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Comput- ers, edited by W. Aspray, pp. 156 -99. Ames: Iowa State University Press. Bush, V. 1991 [1945]. "As We May ThInk." In Prom Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind's Machine, edited by J. M. Nyce and P. Kahn, pp. 83- 1°7. San Diego, Calif.: Academic Press. Originally published

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, no. 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

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, 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

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, L. 199 I. "Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer: The Text and Con- text of an Early Computer." In Prom Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the MInd's MachIne, edited by J. M. Nyce and P. Kahn, pp. 3 -38. San

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The New York Review of Books, April 3: 38. Trigg, R. H. 1991. "From TrailblazIng to Guided Tours: The Legacy of Vannevar Bush's VisIon of Hypertext Use." In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar 274 Works C,ted Bush and the Mind's MachIne, edited by J. M. Nyce and P. Kahn, pp

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, edited by G. Bowker, L. Gasser, L. Star, and W. Turner, pp. 105 -20. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum. Zachary, G. P. 1997. Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, EngIneer of the AmerIcan Century. New York: Free Press. INDEX In this index an "f" after a number indicates a separate reference on the next

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, 170, 242-43n24 Bravo, 162, 256nI3 Breakdown, 224-25 Bush, Vannevar, 38-41, 219; "As We May Think," 38-40, 82, 240n5; legacy, 41; and Memex, 82-83, 91; and planimeter, 98, 249nI6. See also Hypertext Buxton, William, I I 5 CalifornIa DigItal Computer (CALDIC),I2 Card, Stuart, 17 2 , 174

Computer: A History of the Information Machine

by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger  · 29 Jul 2013  · 528pp  · 146,459 words

, the network analyzer was a special-purpose machine. Insofar as it became possible to expand the frontiers of analog computing, this was largely due to Vannevar Bush. Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) is one of the key figures in twentieth-century American science, and although he was not a “computer scientist,” his name will appear

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future. The scientific war effort in the United States was administered by the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). This organization was headed by Vannevar Bush, the former professor of electrical engineering at MIT and inventor of the differential analyzer. Bush was a brilliantly effective research director. Although he had developed

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-card office of the 1920s. PHOTO OF WATSON COURTESY OF IBM; PHOTO OF PUNCHED-CARD OFFICE COURTESY OF MARTIN CAMPBELL-KELLY. Shown with its inventor, Vannevar Bush, in the mid-1930s, the Bush Differential Analyzer was the most powerful analog computing machine developed between the world wars. Bush, a distinguished MIT alumnus

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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

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the age of eighty. Wells’s dream did not die with him. In the postwar period the idea resurfaced and was given new vigor by Vannevar Bush, the scientist and inventor who had developed analog computers and risen to become chief scientific adviser to the president and head of the Office of

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user that its inventor was Edward Jenner; in order to discover more about Jenner, the user would need to search again. The inventors of hypertext—Vannevar Bush in the 1940s and Engelbart and Nelson in the 1960s—had envisaged a system that would enable one to informally skip from document to document

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would be stored in the documents themselves, and they would instantly whisk the reader to related documents. It was all very much as Vannevar Bush had envisioned the memex. The World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee. Its origins dated back to Berners-Lee’s early interest in hypertext in 1980

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the name of the issuing nation. Early predictions of how the Internet would evolve were seemingly extrapolations of H. G. Wells’s World Brain or Vannevar Bush’s memex. In 1937 Wells wrote of his World Brain: “The time is close at hand when any student, in any part of the world, will

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tracks the development of automatic computing through the contributions of a number of pivotal figures: Charles Babbage, L. J. Comrie, Lewis Fry Richardson, Lord Kelvin, Vannevar Bush, Howard Aiken, and Alan Turing. Of these, all but Comrie have standard biographies. They are Anthony Hyman’s Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer (1984

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Fry Richardson (1985), Crosbie Smith and Norton Wise’s Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin (1989), G. Pascal Zachary’s Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (1997), I. Bernard Cohen’s Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer (1999), and Andrew Hodges’s Alan Turing: The

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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

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Management. New York: Harper Torchbooks. ———. 1968. “The Computer Industry’s Great Expectations.” Fortune, August, p. 92. Burke, Colin B. 1994. Information and Secrecy: Vannevar Bush, Ultra, and the Other Memex. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Burks, Alice R., and Arthur W. Burks. 1988. The First Electronic Computer: The Atanasoff Story. Ann Arbor: University of

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, Joseph. 2012. Biomedical Computing: Digitizing Life in the United States. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Nyce, James M., 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

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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.” Technology and Culture 27, no. 1: 63–95. Parker, William N., ed. 1986

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: History, Rhetoric, and Preface. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Yost, Jeffrey R. 2005. The Computer Industry. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Zachary, G. Pascal. 1997. Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century. New York: Free Press. INDEX Aberdeen Proving Ground, 49, 66 Abstract-logical viewpoint, 76, 78–80 Accounting machines and systems

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson  · 6 Oct 2014  · 720pp  · 197,129 words

Engine. 1847 George Boole creates a system using algebra for logical reasoning. 1890 The census is tabulated with Herman Hollerith’s punch-card machines. 1931 Vannevar Bush devises the Differential Analyzer, an analog electromechanical computer. 1935 Tommy Flowers pioneers use of vacuum tubes as on-off switches in circuits. 1937 Alan Turing

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writes “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC” describing a stored-program computer. Six women programmers of ENIAC are sent to Aberdeen for training. Vannevar Bush publishes “As We May Think,” describing personal computer. Bush publishes “Science, the Endless Frontier,” proposing government funding of academic and industrial research. ENIAC is fully

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any form of information. Thus did Ada, Countess of Lovelace, help sow the seeds for a digital age that would blossom a hundred years later. Vannevar Bush (1890–1974), with his Differential Analyzer at MIT. Alan Turing (1912–54), at the Sherborne School in 1928. Claude Shannon (1916–2001) in 1951. CHAPTER

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of Michigan. In his senior year he answered a help-wanted listing tacked to a bulletin board, which offered a job at MIT working under Vannevar Bush helping to run the Differential Analyzer. Shannon got the job and was mesmerized by the machine—not so much the rods and pulleys and wheels

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course in the summer of 1941, Mauchly got the chance to work with a version of the MIT Differential Analyzer, the analog computer designed by Vannevar Bush. The experience amped up his interest in building his own computer. It also made him realize that the resources to do so at a place

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calculating three thousand trajectories from a set of differential equations. The work was often done using one of the Differential Analyzers invented at MIT by Vannevar Bush. The machine’s calculations were combined with the labor of more than 170 people, most of them women, known as “computers,” who tackled equations by

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for the region’s tech startups.49 Fortunately there was a place for entrepreneurs who had outgrown their garages. Fred Terman, a doctoral student of Vannevar Bush’s at MIT who became Stanford University’s dean of engineering, created an industrial park in 1953 on seven hundred acres of undeveloped university property

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easy. Growing the company without money was hard.”28 J. C. R. Licklider (1915–90). Bob Taylor (1932– ). Larry Roberts (1937– ). CHAPTER SEVEN THE INTERNET VANNEVAR BUSH’S TRIANGLE Innovations often bear the imprint of the organizations that created them. For the Internet, this was especially interesting, for it was built by

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, the three groups had been fused together into an iron triangle: the military-industrial-academic complex. The person most responsible for forging this assemblage was Vannevar Bush, the MIT professor who in 1931 built the Differential Analyzer, the early analog computer described in chapter 2.1 Bush was well suited to this

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, and America’s top military science administrator during World War II. “No American has had greater influence in the growth of science and technology than Vannevar Bush,” MIT’s president Jerome Wiesner later proclaimed, adding that his “most significant innovation was the plan by which, instead of building large government laboratories, contracts

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a Mickey Mouse watch and a Gillette Safety Razor. The advent of World War II would change that, producing an explosion of new technologies, with Vannevar Bush leading the way. Worried that America’s military was lagging in technology, he mobilized Harvard president James Bryant Conant and other scientific leaders to convince

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Embedded in the Pentagon, it was empowered to fund basic research at universities and corporate institutes, thus becoming one of many ways the government implemented Vannevar Bush’s vision. It also had a more proximate cause. On October 4, 1957, the Russians launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite. The connection that

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officer, took pictures of each with measuring sticks showing how thick they were. Raytheon, the large Boston-area defense contractor that had been cofounded by Vannevar Bush, emerged as the frontrunner, and even entered into price negotiations with Roberts. But Bob Taylor stepped in and expressed the view, already being pushed by

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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

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, was “in line with the romantic fantasies of the forefathers of the science, such as Norbert Wiener, J. C. R. Licklider, John von Neumann, and Vannevar Bush.”15 All of these experiences led Brand to become the impresario and techie for one of the seminal events of the 1960s counterculture, the January

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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

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putting together an illustrated report.31 As he was working on the paper, Engelbart wrote a fan letter to Vannevar Bush, and he devoted an entire section of his paper to describing the memex machine.32 Seventeen years after Bush had written “As We May Think,” there was still a radical feel to

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or even a hacker. He had no grand theories about augmenting intelligence or the symbiosis wrought by graphical user interfaces. He had never heard of Vannevar Bush or Doug Engelbart. He was instead a hobbyist. Indeed, he had a curiosity and passion that made him, in the words of one coworker, “the

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a single global information space. A web of information would form.”14 What he imagined, although he didn’t know it at the time, was Vannevar Bush’s memex machine—which could store documents, cross-reference them, retrieve them—writ global. But before he got very far in creating Enquire, his consultancy at

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and raised in Wisconsin. Andreessen was a fan of the pioneers of the Internet, and their writings inspired him: “When I got a copy of Vannevar Bush’s ‘As We May Think,’ I said to myself, ‘Yep, there it is! He figured it out!’ Bush envisioned the Internet as fully as you

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. That’s far more rewarding than having it handed down to you.”111 Wikipedia took the world another step closer to the vision propounded by Vannevar Bush in his 1945 essay, “As We May Think,” which predicted, “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails

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webpages, determining who to link to and how, and that human element goes into it.”168 In his seminal 1945 essay “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush had set forth the challenge: “The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through

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is, however, yet another possibility, one that Ada Lovelace would like, which is based on the half century of computer development in the tradition of Vannevar Bush, J. C. R. Licklider, and Doug Engelbart. HUMAN-COMPUTER SYMBIOSIS: “WATSON, COME HERE” “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything,” Ada Lovelace

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ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.”20 His ideas built on the memex personal computer that Vannevar Bush had imagined in his 1945 essay, “As We May Think.” Licklider also drew on his work designing the SAGE air defense system, which

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who preceded them. Steve Jobs built on the work of Alan Kay, who built on Doug Engelbart, who built on J. C. R. Licklider and Vannevar Bush. When Howard Aiken was devising his digital computer at Harvard, he was inspired by a fragment of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine that he found

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, that benefited the common good. It often did so in collaboration with universities and private contractors as part of a government-academic-industrial triangle that Vannevar Bush and others fostered. Talented federal bureaucrats (not always an oxymoron), such as Licklider, Taylor, and Roberts, oversaw the programs and allocated public funds. Private enterprise

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. 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

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’s Machine (Academic Press, 1992); Jennet Conant, Tuxedo Park (Simon & Schuster, 2002); Vannevar Bush oral history, American Institute of Physics, 1964. 2. Weisner

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, “Vannevar Bush.” 3. Zachary, Endless Frontier, 23. 4. Time, Apr. 3, 1944. 5. Time

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, Apr. 3, 1944. 6. Bush, Pieces of the Action, 41. 7. Weisner, “Vannevar Bush.” 8. Vannevar Bush, Science, the Endless Frontier (National Science Foundation, July 1945), vii. 9. Bush, Science, 10. 10. Bush, Pieces of the Action, 65. 11. Joseph V. Kennedy, “

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. 111. J. C. R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, “The Computer as a Communication Device,” Science and Technology, Apr. 1968. CHAPTER EIGHT: THE PERSONAL COMPUTER 1. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic, July 1945. 2. Dave Ahl, who was at the meeting, said, “It fell to Ken Olsen to make a decision

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,” prepared for the director of Information Sciences, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Oct. 1962. 32. Douglas Engelbart to Vannevar Bush, May 24, 1962, MIT/Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium, archives, http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush-symposium.html. 33. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 2, Jan. 14, 1987. 34. Author’s interview with Bob

Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything

by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell  · 15 Feb 2009  · 291pp  · 77,596 words

reprinted from the article appearing in the Atlantic Monthly, “As We May Think,” Vol. 176, No 1 (1945), 641-649 with permission from Edward Vannevar Bush, grandson of Vannevar Bush. Thad Starner: excerpts from the CARPE 2006 presentation © 2006 Thad Starner, Georgia Institute of Technology. All rights reserved. Used with permission. REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA

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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

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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

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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

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it to his friend for insertion in his own memex,” or, in modern parlance, he e-mails a copy to a friend. (I’ll leave it to others to argue the legality of such copies; I merely predict it will happen.) According to Vannevar Bush, “the inheritance from the master becomes, not only

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of a research project that once had volumes of data, “metadata” that describes how the data was gathered, copious notes, and conversations among the researchers. Vannevar Bush saw that more notes and background material might be shared. Jim Gray led the charge in proposing that everything could be shared. Think of the

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time for? Reflection. Anyone wanting to learn and understand will be doing more pondering, more reflecting, more searching for clues and connections to understanding. Vannevar Bush’s imagined memex scientist “ponders over his notes in the evening.” So will farmer Dan, coach Ken, and countless others. Just as the World Wide Web enabled

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of AARON, Painter.” Stanford Humanities Review 4, issue 2 (July): Constructions of the Mind. http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/cohen.html Memex was proposed by Bush in his Atlantic Monthly article. Bush, Vannevar. 1945. “As We May Think.” Atlantic Monthly (July). Reprinted in Life magazine, September 10

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This book tells you much more about Bush, his life, and his amazing technological vision. Nyce, James M., and Paul Kahn (eds.). 1992. From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine. Boston: Academic Press. In this report, Bush proposes the National Science Foundation (NSF) and more. Bush, Vannevar. 1945. “Science

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The Endless Frontier. A Report to the President by Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, July 1945.” Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office. http://www.nsf.gov/about/history

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Age Brain Fitness Program A Brief History of Time (Hawking) British Library British National Health Service Bush, Vannevar and higher learning and lifelong learning and memex on scientific research and “trails,” business card scanners Business Channel C calendars Calvin, John cameras and bio-memory and digitizing images and electronic memory and

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

by John Markoff  · 1 Jan 2005  · 394pp  · 108,215 words

, which ran on an early MIT-designed TX-2 minicomputer, was the first program to embody a complete graphical user interface. With figures like Sutherland, Vannevar Bush, J. C. R. Licklider, Robert Taylor, Theodor Nelson, and the computer hackers3 at MIT, all of the intellectual ingredients for personal computing existed on the

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across a description of an article that had appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in July of 1945.4 It contained a proposal by the physicist Vannevar Bush for the creation of a machine that could track and retrieve vast volumes of information. As director of the Pentagon’s Office of Scientific Research

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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

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, 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

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data processing. Previously, teams of humans had served a single computer; now, the computer would become a personal assistant. The notion flowed directly from Vannevar Bush’s Memex, and Xerox researcher Alan Kay’s Dynabook—a fantasy concept of a powerful, wirelessly networked portable computer—was to embody the idea a decade later

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he could clearly see that his computerized mechanism would fundamentally change the way people worked with information. He offered his readers a quick tour of Vannevar Bush’s Memex system and spent several pages discussing “associative linking” possibilities, a notion that was to serve as the forerunner of hypertext and led three decades

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was not a computer scientist, Taylor had read widely in the literature about the interaction of humans and computers. He had also been intrigued by Vannevar Bush’s Atlantic article when he was in college and had read the work of cyberneticist Norbert Wiener. Most important, however, was that he knew J

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an integral part of the design. That was at the heart of the epiphanies that Engelbart had years earlier, which led to the realization of Vannevar Bush’s Memex information-retrieval system of the 1940s. During the period from the early 1960s until 1969, when most of the development of the NLS system

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who witnessed it, it was more than a bolt from the blue: It was a religious experience, inspiring the same kinds of passion that Vannevar Bush’s Memex article had given rise to for Engelbart twenty-three years earlier. Computing was just beginning to have an impact on society. Local newspaper articles that

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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

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. New York: Harper Business, 2000. Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968. Zachary, G. Pascal. Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century. New York: Free Press, 1997. INDEX Adobe Systems Air Force, U.S. Albrecht, Bob est and folk dancing of Homebrew

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age

by Alex Wright  · 6 Jun 2014

scientists like Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and Alan Turing; networking visionaries like Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn; as well as hypertext seers like Vannevar Bush, J. C. R. Licklider, Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and of course Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, who in 1991 released their first version of

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$2.00). In the mid-1930s, IBM was building its portfolio of electronic devices (even before it had started manufacturing any of them), long before Vannevar Bush, then dean of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published his famous essay “As We May Think.” Today, most computer science historians have characterized

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it from falling into the hands of a few (in the way that atomic experiments in the next few years would highlight, and in which Vannevar Bush would be directly involved). And the notion of organizing chaos was predominant. There was, as Wells argued and Otlet agreed, a need for a “greater

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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

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to point out, credit cannot and should not go to any one individual. Tim Berners-Lee, for example, did not invent the Internet. Nor did Vannevar Bush, H. G. Wells, or Paul Otlet. Most wisdom on the subject has now settled on a far-flung group of researchers funded by the U

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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

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on his vision with the first computer-based hypertext experiments of the 1960s. Years later, Licklider would dedicate his report, Libraries of the Future, to Vannevar Bush. On December 9, 1968, Douglas Engelbart took the stage before a packed house at Brooks Hall Auditorium in San Francisco to give his first public

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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

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, 2013. Brown, James Duff. “The Book Museum at Brussels.” Library World 10 ( July 1907): 337–38. Buckland, Michael. “Emanuel Goldberg, Electronic Document Retrieval, and Vannevar Bush’s Memex.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 43, no. 4 (May 1992): 284–94. ———. “On the Cultural and Intellectual Context of European Documentation.” In

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing

by Ed Finn  · 10 Mar 2017  · 285pp  · 86,853 words

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

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computation.11 Of course this is what algorithms do: they are methods, inheriting the inductive tradition of the scientific method and engineering from Archimedes to Vannevar Bush. They solve problems that have been identified as such by the engineers and entrepreneurs who develop and optimize the code. But such implementations are never

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only do together. 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

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associations between documents that constituted a personal paratextual layer, a set of maps for the wilderness of microfilm inhabiting one’s desk. Figure 6.1 Vannevar Bush’s Memex. The trail was Bush’s response to the central challenge of the nascent information age, the question of selection. He imagines the new occupation

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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

The Internet Is Not the Answer

by Andrew Keen  · 5 Jan 2015  · 361pp  · 81,068 words

studied with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge, Wiener was part of a pioneering group of technologists at MIT that included the electrical engineer and science mandarin Vannevar Bush and the psychologist J. C. R. Licklider. Without quite knowing what they were doing, these men invented many of the key principles of our networked

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,” explains the Internet historian John Naughton. “And when we dip into it seeking the origins of the Net, three names always come up. They are Vannevar Bush, Norbert Wiener and J. C. R. Licklider.”10 In the 1930s, Wiener had been part of the team that worked on

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Vannevar Bush’s “differential analyser,” a 100-ton electromagnetic analog computer cobbled together out of pulleys, shafts, wheels, and gears and which was designed to solve differential

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Roosevelt commit the US military to producing ten thousand aircraft per year, but he also set up the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), directed by Vannevar Bush, who by then had become the president’s chief scientific advisor, to invest in more cooperation between the US government and six thousand of the

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James Harkin,12 was born with Wiener’s revolutionary flight path predictor machine. While Norbert Wiener’s technical challenge was making sense of scarce information, Vannevar Bush was worried about its overabundance. In September 1945, Bush published an article titled “As We May Think,” in the Atlantic Monthly magazine. The purpose of

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became an outspoken critic of government investment in scientific and particularly military research and who worried about the impact of digital computers upon jobs,14 Vannevar Bush believed that government investment in science represented an unambiguously progressive force. In July 1945, Bush also wrote an influential paper for President Roosevelt entitled “Science

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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

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the information-handling machines we know today.”18 Just as Norbert Wiener saw computers as more than calculating devices able to solve differential equations and Vannevar Bush believed they could effectively organize information, Licklider recognized that these new thinking machines were, first and foremost, communications devices. A division of labor between men

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software and protocols unintelligible to other computers. But J. C. R. Licklider’s Intergalactic Computer Network was about to become a reality. The peace that Vannevar Bush welcomed in July 1945 had never really materialized. America had instead quickly become embroiled in a new war—the Cold War. And it was this

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, 150,000 registered addresses, and several million computers. But this project to network the world wasn’t quite complete. 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

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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

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discovered the Internet, he also returned to his larger vision of a single global information space. By this time, he’d discovered the work of Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson and become familiar with what he called “the advances” of technology giants like Donald Davies, Paul Baran, Bob Kahn, and Vint Cerf

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created new values, new wealth, new debates, new elites, new scarcities, new markets, and above all, a new kind of economy. Well-intentioned technologists like Vannevar Bush, Norbert Wiener, J. C. R. Licklider, Paul Baran, Robert Kahn, and Tim Berners-Lee had little interest in money, but one of the most significant

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—from World War II through the end of the Cold War in the early nineties—is a narrative of public-spirited technologists and academics like Vannevar Bush, Paul Baran, and Tim Berners-Lee, and of publicly funded institutions like NDRC, ARPA, and NSFNET. This is primarily a story of how the Internet

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doctoral students, Google began with the kind of audacious idea that would have challenged the intellects of Internet pioneers like J. C. R. Licklider and Vannevar Bush. Like Bush, Page and Brin were concerned with the problem of information overload. The digital universe was exploding—the number of computers connected to the

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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

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academics themselves. They wanted to do “something that mattered,” which would change the world. In a different age, they might have had public careers like Vannevar Bush or J. C. R. Licklider, spent inside nonprofit universities and government agencies, working for the public good as the world’s librarians by organizing all

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improving the product. Even more valuable, from Google’s point of view, is what Google learns about us each time we make that search. Like Vannevar Bush’s Memex, the Google trails never “fade” and Google, for better or worse, never forgets. All our digital trails are crunched into statistical products like Google

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the reverse, the exact opposite, of the old top-down system of the post–World War II era in which government-appointed wise men like Vannevar Bush and J. C. R. Licklider funded the invention of major public projects like the Internet rather than potato salad. Another of Andreessen Horowitz’s venture

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books to recognize the corrosive impact of information technology on economic equality. Up till then, it was assumed that technological innovation was beneficial for society. Vannevar Bush, in the “Science, the Endless Frontier” report he wrote for Roosevelt in 1945, took it for granted that constant scientific and technological progress would inevitably

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engineer Paul Baran. TCP/IP inventors Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf say they created it. Others award the honor to “As We May Think” author Vannevar Bush or to J. C. R. Licklider, the “Man-Computer Symbiosis” visionary who dreamed up the Intergalactic Computer Network. More literary types even suggest that the

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everything we do is recorded and remembered. Bentham’s eighteenth-century Panopticon has been upgraded to a twenty-first-century instrument of mass surveillance. Like Vannevar Bush’s Memex, its trails never fade; like Ted Nelson’s hypertext, there is no “concept of deletion”; like Erich Mielke’s Stasi, its appetite for our

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. 11 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1948). 12 Harkin, Cyburbia, p. 22. 13 Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1945. 14 Naughton, A Brief History of the Future, p. 65. 15 “Science, The Endless Frontier,” a report

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to the president by Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, July 1945. 16 Naughton, A Brief History of the Future, p. 70. 17 Katie Hafner and

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America

by Margaret O'Mara  · 8 Jul 2019

The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can't See

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Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

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The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere

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Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

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Abundance

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