
As We May Think (1945) - JumpCrisscross
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/?single_page=true
======
jgrahamc
The most interesting thing about this article, to me, is that part 7 is often
skimmed and not understood. Bush describes the user building his own 'trail'
of linked item (books, articles, etc.) and being able to store that trail. He
was not envisaging the web as we have it (consisting of links chosen by
authors), but of the ability to form your own web of connections.

It's in section 8 that he describes the something similar to the web. I've
always felt that better tools could be built for part 7.

How many times have I lost the thread of thought while surfing the web and
been forced to re-search to find my way back?

~~~
Turing_Machine
Yes.

I also regret that we don't have Ted Nelson's original idea for hypertext, in
which incoming links were also visible by default.

Of course in reality the spammers would have a field day with that -- every
popular page would have about a jillion incoming links for dubious
pharmaceuticals and dodgy gambling operations, but still, one can dream.

~~~
philwelch
Can't you hack that together with a [link:] query on Google? You can even use
Google's ordering algorithm as a spam filter.

~~~
gwern
link: has been incomplete for years and years; when I heard of link: I thought
it'd be so awesome, and then I encountered the brutal reality...

You can approximate something similar though on sites you control: set Google
Analytics to record referring URLs and after a few time-units, dump the set
per-page to construct a manual trackback.

~~~
jcampbell1
Don't do this if you care anything about SEO. It will make your site appear to
Google as part of a reciprocal link scheme, and it will get nuked from the
index.

~~~
reitzensteinm
Marking the links as rel="nofollow" should prevent that from happening,
shouldn't it?

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caf
The Office of Scientific Research and Development was essentially the civilian
side of the Manhattan Project. Interestingly this article was published in the
same month as Trinity, at which Vannevar Bush was present. The Manhattan
Project itself was still a tightly held secret at this point.

A contemporary picture of Bush:
[http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=3dcd2f9a3fce36...](http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=3dcd2f9a3fce368f)

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jrkelly
Vannevar Bush is an absolutely incredible guy. If you want to understand the
origins of the modern academic research complex and Bush's role in building it
definitely check out 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' by Richard Rhodes.

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dm8
It is the classic essay written about the future in 1945. We got fundamentals
(of computing age) for topics like hyperlinks, information retrieval etc. in
this article.

I guess I've read somewhere that people like Doug Englebart (father of
computer mouse) were inspired by this essay and made that vision into reality.

~~~
davepeck
If Bush's essay is the start of a trail, then Englebart's "Mother Of All
Demos" is the next waypoint:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs>

This is great, critical history to absorb about our industry.

(As an aside, I feel that the introduction of the original iPhone is in some
ways a spiritual successor to Englebart's demo.)

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patfla
Vannevar Bush's idea for the PC (and web) as an aid to memory is coming true
big time. For better or worse, it's often those who already well educated who
benefit the most.

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grlloyd
Doug Engelbart Institute posted a link to videos and transcripts of the Oct
1995 Brown / MIT Vannevar Bush symposium celebrating the 50th anniversary of
AWMT:

"As We May Think: A Celebration of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Vision, An Examination
of What Has Been Accomplished, and What Remains to Be Done"

Excellent talks and panels with Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Andy van Dam, Alan
Kay, Tim Berners-Lee, Paul Kahn, Lee Sproul, Raj Reddy, Michael Lesk, Bob
Kahn, and others.

Douglas Adams was the dinner speaker (great talk, unfortunately no video or
audio record).

[http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush-
symposium....](http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush-
symposium.html)

"The event was in fact an exhibition of Bush's legacy, a self-referential,
interweaving (intertwingling, Ted Nelson would say) of all the themes -
social, technological, and psychological - from Bush's paper. In the course of
two days it became very clear how deep and ambitious - socially and culturally
- Bush's most central ideas were. At every turn we were reminded that Bush was
writing about how fundamentally new intellectual practices could change the
entire landscape of human social life. Bush's vision was not just about
hypertext, or data management, or information retrieval, let alone about
microfilm or calculating machines; rather, it was about extending the power of
human beings by giving them radically new ways of working together.

The goal of fundamentally changing how we work in order to address pressing
human problems continued to be central throughout the development of Bush's
legacy in the '60s and '70s, most obviously in the work of Engelbart, Nelson,
and Kay. Its continued evidence throughout the symposium - even (perhaps most
notably)in the presentation of Tim Berners-Lee, the youngest speaker - and the
warm response of the audience made it clear that this optimistic social agenda
still resonates. It seems that we are not too jaded, skeptical, or post-modern
to believe, 50 years later, that technology can bring us 'a new relationship
between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge', one that will promote 'the
application of science to the needs and desires of man' ('As We May Think')."

from <http://www.cs.brown.edu/memex/Bush_Symposium_Interact.html>

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mceoin
Old School! Nice to see Bush sprouting up on Hacker News!

@Turing_Machine - stay tuned. 2-way public hyperlinks might just be on their
way : )

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andyjohnson0
Is there any evidence that this article actually informed or inspired the
pioneering work on hypertext systems (Xanadu, HES, Intermedia, etc)? Or was it
brought in later to add historical credibility to the idea? IN would be
intersting to see a citation history.

Its a great article, though, and Vannevar Bush was an impressive guy.

~~~
grlloyd
AWMT was certainly a hot topic and required course reading from 1968 on... I
was a student of Andy van Dam's in that era and early user of the Hypertext
Editing System developed at Brown with Ted Nelson.

Certainly for Intermedia and Nelson's "Literary Machines" era; Nelson
published a full copy of AWMT in his 1980 book.

Doug Engelbart frequently tells the story of reading "As We May Think" as an
enlisted radar technician in a thatched hut Red Cross Library in 1945 (see
Belinda Barnet link below)

Ted Nelson said in an Aug 2000 telephone interview:

"I think I read it when it came out in 1945. Since I was eight my memory is
necessarily incomplete. Everyone else who would have been in the family is now
deceased. But we did subscribe to the Atlantic Monthly and I think there's a
very good chance I read it at that time." ~ Ted Nelson

<http://illuminationgallery.net/wr/hypertext/nelson.html>

Belinda Barnet's PhD thesis on the intellectual history of hypertext will be
published as a book early next year, including extensive interviews with Doug
Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Andy van Dam.

She writes frequently on the subject, often published in Digital Humanities
Quarterly: <http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/>

For a good 2008 paper by Belinda and Darren Toffs, on Bush, Engelbart and
Nelson see:

Too Dimensional: Literary and Technical Images of Potentiality in the History
of Hypertext

[http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackw...](http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405148641/9781405148641.xml&doc.view=content&chunk.id=ss1-5-9&toc.depth=1&brand=9781405148641_brand&anchor.id=0)

A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens.
Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.

~~~
andyjohnson0
Thanks, very interesting. And some useful links.

I wrote my masters dissertation on hypermedia back in 1991, and I remember
that references to AWMT kept appearing in papers I was reading. When I read it
I could see how it related to hypermedia as it existed in the early nineties,
but 1945 seemed rather distant and the paper seemed to stand on its own,
rather than being the start of something. I haven't thought about it since,
but it now seems obvious that this was because of my lack of knowledge at the
time. I wasn't aware then of Englebart's work, for example.

I re-read Literary Machines only last year, but had completely forgotten that
Nelson included AWMT in it. I may pull it off the bookshelf again tonight.

~~~
grlloyd
I think the trail led from Doug Engelbart and folk who were directly or
indirectly influenced by his 1968 Demo as well as Ted Nelson and Computer Lib
/ Literary Machines.

Doug donated his personal copy of "As We May Think" with marginal notes to the
Computer History Museum (you can download a copy). He wrote about Bush's
influence in "Augmenting Human Intelligence" (1962) and talked about it in a
Stanford University Oral History interview.

See [http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush-
symposium....](http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush-
symposium.html#3)

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jasongullickson
This pops up in front of me every couple years and I always get something new
out of it each time.

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Timmy_C
I can't tell you how many times I had to read this in college. It was the
first text we read in at least 5 of my courses my junior year.

Both classic and ahead of his time.

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grlloyd
"Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century" (1999 MIT
Press)is an excellent biography of Bush by G. Pascal Zachary.

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Evbn
Vennaver Bush invented the blogosphere :-)

> The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it
> with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at
> any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a
> particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find
> delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass
> of the common record.

