Memex Desk and Related Machines
The first practical office of the future concept was probably the series of Memex machines which were presented in Life (magazine) on November 1945. Life magazine hired an illustrator from Sperry Rand to make drawings of the concepts Vannevar Bush had presented a few months earlier in The Atlantic Monthly magazine under the title As We May Think.
The Memex article in The Atlantic is most often cited because of its longer text which details the proposal of a system of shared microfilm based hyperlinks which could be considered as a precursor to the World Wide Web. Those citations tend to overlook the massive organization it would have taken to mail all those microfilm reels between scientists, and eventually between any knowledge worker, in order to make the system work. The citations also tend to overlook that Memex was an entire system, composed not only of a massive desk which housed the microfilm hyperlinking equipment, and the microfilm library but also of a speech activated typewriter (also capable of speech synthesis from normal paper text) and other accessories.
Read more about this topic: Office Of The Future
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