Bush on the memex
📚SOURCE
💎PERMANENT NOTES
🧵SYNTHESIS
Paraphrase, not quotation: the whole essay, 📰 As We May Think, with most attention on its last third.
In the summer of 1945 the man who had organised American wartime research asked what scientists should do next. His answer: make the record of human knowledge usable. Publication had outrun anyone's ability to find what was already known, and the bottleneck was not storage but selection. Libraries file each item in one place under one heading. The mind does not work like that. It moves from one thing to the next by association.
So he imagines a desk he calls the memex, holding a private library on microfilm, where the owner can join any two items so that calling up one calls up the other. A chain of joined items is a trail. Trails can be named, kept, and handed to a friend, and he foresees people whose trade is making them.
The machinery was wrong in every detail. The idea is the page I am typing on.
✨KEY IDEAS
The problem is no longer producing or storing knowledge; it is finding the relevant piece again.
An index puts each item in one place, and to find it you must retrace the path of headings. The mind jumps sideways.
In the memex, two items are tied together so that either one leads to the other, and a sequence of ties is a trail.
A trail can be given to someone else and slotted into their own machine.
He expects the essential human work, the mature and creative kind, to stay with people; the machine takes the repetitive part.
📝READING NOTES
The essay in three parts
1. The situation. Science has been organised for war and now has to choose a peacetime purpose. Research is piling up faster than it can be read. He mentions Mendel, whose work on heredity sat unread for a generation because it never reached the people who could use it.
2. The gadgets. Long passages on dry photography, microfilm small enough to put an encyclopaedia in a matchbox, a machine that types from speech, calculators that do logic. Charming, and mostly wrong, and beside the point.
3. The memex. A desk with slanted screens, a keyboard, levers. You consult your books and papers on it. Then the essential feature: associative indexing. His worked example is someone curious about why a short Turkish bow outperformed the English longbow. He pulls up an encyclopaedia article, joins it to a history, branches off into the physics of elasticity, adds a page of his own notes, and years later can run the whole trail again for a friend in a few minutes.
What I think is the real claim
Not machines will store everything. It is that the route between two ideas is itself worth keeping. Filing preserves items. A trail preserves a thought.
That finished a permanent note I had half written after Matuschak: 💎 An idea is found by what it connects to and not by where it is filed.
Arguments with a man from 1945
Bush assumes that if the trail exists, understanding follows. I have three dead systems full of links that say otherwise. A link without a sentence saying why these two things belong together is just a second filing scheme. He does let his user add a comment to the trail; that small detail is carrying more weight than he gives it.
- His user is a lone professional man at a desk. There is no sense of notes as something written badly at 06:30 on a tram.
- He solves selection and says nothing about forgetting. A trail I never walk again is a folder.
Afterwards
Watched the highlights of 🎬 The Mother of All Demos this evening. Engelbart read this essay as a young man and spent twenty years building it. Twenty-three years from essay to demo. Seeing a link followed on a screen in 1968 is stranger than reading about a microfilm desk.
On the map: 04. 🗃️ Notes & Writing. The modern statement of the same rule is in 📖 Matuschak on evergreen notes.
Reading record
- Section read: Whole essay; sections 6 to 8 twice
🗣️IN SHORT
- In : As We May Think (1945), mainly the sections on the memex
- Bush argues that : the record of knowledge has become useless without a new way to select from it, and that selection should follow association, as the mind does, and not an index
- by stating that : a personal machine could tie any two items together into lasting trails, which could be named, replayed and shared, so that the path between ideas is stored along with the ideas