Every decade or so a piece of writing appears that conditions our thinking and helps shape the course of history. Work like Eric S. Raymond’s, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” for example, help expose truths to us that, until they’re written down, somehow remain outside our grasp. In some cases it can be decades until we appreciate the full impact that they have.
“As We May Think,” by Vannevar Bush in 1945 is also such a work. I’ve recently come accross it in two very different contexts; and re-reading it today, it’s startling just how visionary it was and how illuminating it remains. Here’s a particularly fun passage that we could argue anticipates charge cards accepted by merchants (not invented until 5 years later in 1950):
Take the prosaic problem of the great department store. Every time a charge sale is made, there are a number of things to be done. The inventory needs to be revised, the salesman needs to be given credit for the sale, the general accounts need an entry, and, most important, the customer needs to be charged. A central records device has been developed in which much of this work is done conveniently. The salesman places on a stand the customer’s identification card, his own card, and the card taken from the article sold – all punched cards. When he pulls a lever, contacts are made through the holes, machinery at a central point makes the necessary computations and entries, and the proper receipt is printed for the salesman to pass to the customer. …The whole record on the card may be made by magnetic dots on a steel sheet if desired, instead of dots to be observed optically, following the scheme by which Poulsen long ago put speech on a magnetic wire.
Later, another passage appears to very nearly describe what we today call “hyperlinks,” via an invention he labels a “memex” (I bolded a passage that brings wikipedia to mind):
the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing. …Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails. …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. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client’s interest. The physician, puzzled by its patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.
If we had to identify a specific inflection point in history – a single point at which we moved from the industrial age to the information age – this acticle might be it. Highly recommended reading.
