As We May Think - Concept Realization

Concept Realization

As We May Think predicted (to some extent) many kinds of technology invented after its publication, including hypertext, personal computers, the Internet, the World Wide Web, speech recognition, and online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia: "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified." Bush envisioned the ability to retrieve several articles or pictures on one screen, with the possibility of writing comments that could be stored and recalled together. He believed people would create links between related articles, thus mapping the thought process and path of each user and saving it for others to experience. Wikipedia is one example of how this vision has been realized, allowing users to link words to other related topics, while browser user history maps the trails of the various possible paths of interaction. Bush's article also laid the foundation for new media. Doug Engelbart came across the essay shortly after its publication, and keeping the memex in mind, he "began work that would eventually result in the invention of the mouse, the word processor, the hyperlink and concepts of new media for which these groundbreaking inventions were merely enabling technologies."

At the same time, a reader now may be surprised how little some technologies have actually advanced since As We May Think was published during 1945. It is true that, for instance, storage has greatly surpassed the level imagined by Vannevar Bush, who wrote: "The Encyclopedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk". However, technologies such as speech recognition and associative ways of indexing information are largely underdeveloped and most individuals are interacting with computers in non-natural ways, adapting to technology instead of having technology adapt to users. Automated speech recognition was possible at that time already in the form of early vocoders, but is still rarely used to type texts or operate computers. Indexing of information at the time is described by Bush as being artificial: "When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used." This description resembles popular file systems of modern computer operating systems (FAT, NTFS, ext3 when used without hard links and symlinks, etc.), which do not easily enable associative indexing as imagined by Bush.