The History of the Internet: Remembering Vannevar Bush and the Memex (1945)

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On this day, which may or not be the 40^th anniversary of the first use of the internet (and the 80^th anniversary of the collapse of the stock market of ’29, and Lucy A’s anniversary of her birth) it might be good to remember an earlier version of the internet and the semi-invention of the concept of hypertext: the MEMEX machine of the under-remembered Vannevar Bush. 

Vannevar (pronounced “van ee var”) was a flinty no-nonsense New Englander who was an organizational and mechanical genius who as a professor at MIT developed a remarkable analog computer that greatly advance computation capacities for solving differential equations.  This was in the 1930’s, and even after creating an improved electromechanical version of the machine still chose the wrong way to go in the soon-to-materialize digital computer revolution.  During WWII Bush was one of the most important Americans in the war effort, overseeing the entire scientific effort of the U.S.—an enormous effort dispatched beautifully (and successfully).  His importance in this regard is difficult to overstate.

But right there at the end of the war, when he was organizing a still-secret effort of controlling the spread of atomic weapons (before Hiroshima), Bush was also thinking about the future of the organization of human knowledge and memory.  And published it, too, in the popular Atlantic magazine in July 1945. (It was republished in a shortened version a few months later in September—it remains to this day, according to an editor at Atlantic, one of the most often-requested reprints) where it reached a reading audience of millions.  The article, “As We May Think”, outlined his idea for a device he called the MEMEX¹ (“memory” and  “index”), which compressed and organized all that its user could remember and whatever information would be obtained in the future via electromechanical apparatuses, and available with associative tracking between the microtext frames.  So all manner of book and papers and reports and newspapers and images would be microphotographed and stored in a beautifully-indexed mechanical retrieval system where it would live with the information of others.  There was also the possibility of real-time textual additions to whatever it was that was retrieved, the genetic precursor of hypertext.  Bush’s thinking has been deeply recognized (and also by the creators of the internet) as the intellectual grandparent of the modern internet. 

I just thought on this day that the man who saw more clearly into the future on advanced global communication and societal memory should be remembered on a day when his grandchild came into being.

Notes:

1. According to Bush, “the MEMEX is a sort of mechanized private file and library…. It uses methods such as microfilm storage, dry photography, and analog computing to give postwar scholars access to a huge, indexed repository of knowledge-any section of which can be called up with a few keystrokes."  Wardrip-Fruin, Noah and Nick Montfort, ed (2003). The New Media Reader. p. 35. The MIT Press

The physical plant of the MEMEX:  “A memex consists of a desk, where on top are slating translucent screens on which material can be projected for convenient reading. Within the desk were mechanisms that stored information through microphotography. Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. When a longhand note, photograph, memoranda, and other things are in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film, dry photography being employed.”  Manovich, Lev. "As We May Think", The New Media Reader and wiki on The Memex.