Bush, V. (1945) As We May Think. The Atlantic. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
1945: End of World War II
"The scientists [...] have shared greatly and learned much. [...] Now, for many, this appears to be approaching an end. What are the scientists to do next?"
The work is broken into eight sections.
The lasting benefit of tools and instruments.
"Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort
to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial."
The reason for Application Programming Interfaces (API).
"...cheap complex devices of great reliability..."
"A record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted."
Editable, findable, searchable, reliable, persistent, translatable...
Talks about technologies of the age, their potential improvements and combinations, and scale. Makes predictions only based on "present" technology.
Methods of creating records.
Speaking into a machine that records words as text.
Hands free photographs and documents that could be correlated based on time (and location).
"...creative thought and essentially repetitive thought are very different things. For the latter there are, and may be, powerful mechanical aids."
More specifics on repetive thought and its extraction to machines is covered here.
More machines beyond the simple arithmtical ones to come, must be produced to
free those "skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane, and [...]
[employ] intuitive judgment in the choice of the manipulative processe."
"Some of them will be sufficiently bizarre to suit the most fastidious
connoisseur of the present artifacts of civilization."
Beyond mathmatics (stated as scientist?) - Formal Logic
"rapid selection" - database lookup/searching
A system to process a sale at a deparment store is used as an example with technology combinations guessed at, which basically discribes credit cards and point-of-sale systems (people, scanner, computer, server...).
Selection.
Indexing vs Association
"One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind
follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind
decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected
from storage."
"memex" - personal computer
"On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are placed longhand
notes, photographs, memoranda, [...] the depression of a lever causes it to be
photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film..."
Building trails of associations.
An example of how this could be done in the "memex" and how the information
could be shared.
"Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, [...] with a mesh of associative trails [...], ready to be [...] amplified."
"Technical difficulties of all sorts have been ignored, certainly, but also ignored are means as yet unknown which may come any day to accelerate technical progress..."
The idea of:
"...forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important."
Bush focuses on scientifc uses of technology for improving scientific research. Mark Weiser instead focuses on more everyday life.
The mindset of 1945 is easier to keep in this paper by Vannevar Bush than in The Computer for the 21st Century by Mark Weiser.
Modern electronic readers need the ability to skip mulitiple pages at a time.
Swipe systems might use two-fingered swipes to skip ahead 5 pages.
Button navigations could use quick succession double taps...
The number of pages stepped through could be altered. (See section 6.)
One to two pages could be considered about 60 to 120 lines.