Chapter 9:

Excerpts from "As We May Think"

Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose...The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5,000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely. It affords an immediate step...to associative indexing, 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.

When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in a code book, and taps it out on his keyboard.

Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined. In each code space appears the code word. Out of view, but also in the code space, is inserted a set of dots for photocell viewing; and on each item these dots by their positions designate the index number of the other item.

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 from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails.

The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex.

First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.

IT Timeline

SOURCES: PBS Online companion Web site for television special "Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires," http://www.pbs.org/nerds/timeline/micro.html; Virginia Tech Virtual Museum of Computing, Chronology of Events in Computer History, http://video.cs.vt.edu:90/cgi-bin/Lobby?Method=Chronology; Leiner et al. (1998).

Growth of the Internet

The Internet is a meta-network for a variety of subnetworks and applications such as the World Wide Web, bulletin boards, Usenet newsgroups, e-mail, scientific data exchange, and more. The foundation for the Internet was ARPANET, which started as four computer nodes in 1969. ARPANET was initiated by DARPA and was based on a then-new telecommunications technology called packet switching. ARPANET flourished as a medium for information and data exchange among universities and research laboratories. Moreover, it stimulated the development of TCP/IP, a communications protocol that enabled the interconnection of diverse networks. By the late 1970s, ARPANET comprised hundreds of computer nodes and integrated several separate computer networks, including one based on satellite technology.

The Internet grew out of the ARPANET, which converted to the TCP/IP protocol in 1983. NSF sponsored CSNET and later NSFNET (a high-speed network to link supercomputing centers), which became the backbone for the Internet. NSFNET replaced ARPANET in 1990 and expanded to include a variety of regional networks that linked universities into the backbone network. Many smaller networks linked into NSFNET. By early 1994, commercial networks became widespread, and almost half of all registered users of the network were commercial entities.

Two other events dramatically reshaped the character of the Internet. First, in 1989, scientists at CERN developed the World Wide Web and introduced it in experimental form. Second, in 1993, a team of programmers at NSF's National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois introduced Mosaic, a graphical (hypermedia) browser for exploring the Web. Mosaic was made available on the Internet at no cost, and Web use soared. (See figure 9-4.)

NSFNET was fully privatized in 1995, when there were enough commercial Internet service providers, Web browsers, and search engines to sustain the network's operations and management. The Internet continues to evolve. The Next Generation Internet Initiative is developing a higher-speed, more functional telecommunications network.

For more information on the Internet, see Cerf (1997) and Leiner et al. (1998).