Memex
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The "memex" was a theoretical analog computer described by the scientist and engineer Vannevar Bush in the 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article "As We May Think." The word was a contraction of "memory extender." Bush described the device as electronically linked to a library and able to display books and films from the library and automatically follow cross-references from one work to another. This idea directly influenced computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart, and also led to Ted Nelson's groundbreaking work in concepts of hypermedia and hypertext.
The memex not only offered linked information to a user, but was also a tool for establishing the links. The technology used would have been a combination of electromechanical controls and microfilm cameras and readers, all integrated into a large desk. Most of the microfilm library would have been contained within the desk, but the user could add or remove microfilm reels at will.
The technology of the memex is often confused with that of hypertext. Although Bush's idea inspired the creation of hypertext, it is not considered to be hypertext. The memex as proposed by Bush could only create links between a pair of microfilm frames, but it could not create links in the modern sense where a hyperlink can be based on a single word, phrase or picture within a document.
Furthermore, Bush's crude notion of associative trails has generally not been implemented in the vast majority of hypertext systems. An associative trail as conceived by Bush would be a way to create a new "linear" sequence of microfilm frames across any arbitrary sequence of microfilm frames by creating a chained sequence of links in the way just described. The closest analogy with the modern Web browser would be to create a list of bookmarks pointing to articles relevant to a topic, and then to have some mechanism for automatically scrolling through the articles. Needless to say, modern hypertext systems with word and phrase-level linking offer far more sophisticated methods for connecting relevant information.
However, the memex also had other features; the user could generate new information on microfilm, such as by taking photos from paper or from a touch-sensitive translucent screen. As observers like Tim Oren have pointed out, the memex could be considered to be a microfilm-based precursor to the personal computer. The November 1945 Life magazine article showed the first illustrations of what the memex desk (http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/Secondary.html) could look like, as well as illustrations of a head-mounted camera, which a scientist could wear while doing experiments, and a typewriter capable of voice recognition and of reading text by speech synthesis. Taken together, these memex machines were probably the earliest practical description of what we would call today the Office of the future.
The system had no automatic search, nor a universal metadata scheme such as a standard library classification or an hypertext element set like the Dublin core. Instead, when the user made an entry, such as a new or annotated manuscript, typescript or image, he was expected to index and describe it in his personal code book. By consulting his code book, the user could retrace annotated and generated entries.
The memex inspired Microsoft Research's Gordon Bell's project, MyLifeBits, a database-powered digital store of photographs, documents, communications and even web-browsing statistics of Bell, searchable, annotated and indexed. This ongoing project attempts to capture a lifetime of experiences as automatically as possible for future use and reference with ease.
External link
- Gordon Bell's MyLifeBits, inspired by the memex (http://research.microsoft.com/barc/mediapresence/MyLifeBits.aspx)de:Memex