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As We Already Do © Sveta There was a time in the history of mankind when the oldest person was considered the wisest, simply because he had a lot of years to learn about the known existing
things. There was time then the writing and reading was sign of a higher education. There was a time of the universal geniuses, such as Galileo Galilei, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, who were physicists, mathematicians, artists and inventors. But those times are long gone. Since the technical revolution, which began in the Renaissance, human
knowledge has extended rapidly. As a huge and mighty tree it grew a widespread crown with new fresh twigs spurting out every moment. Already six decades ago, when
Vannevar Bush wrote his article As We May Think, it was clear that human memory couldn’t deal with the enormous amount of information and the “methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose”(Bush).
Bush, who was an engineer, inventor and politician, had the mind of a visionary scientist and practical organizer. This combination was probably the key element in the development of his idea of a “memex”, “a future devise for individual use”, which would deal with the man’s “ability to make real use of
the record” (Bush). The article As We May Think was published in July 1945,
three months after the capitulation of Germany and the end of war in Europe and a month before the nuclear bombs destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bush wrote about the future and from the standpoint of today it is easy to point out and criticize his mistakes, but it is even more interesting to read his ideas and make use of his
prophecies in our every day’s work on computer.
 His concept of the microfilms and “memex”
analog system aside, Bush though about a device for personal use, which could contain a lot of compressed information in the form of documents, graphics, photos and etc. The individuals could store a lot of documentation in this system: books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals and newspapers. It would operate at a high speed, accept commands
from a keyboard and display the information on a screen. By the spelling of the documents code on the keyboard the “memex” could make it promptly available and display not only one, but several documents at the same moment. It would help find information based on the association and context. But the essential feature of this device should be “the
process of tying two items together […]” (Bush). This way it would be possible to join any number of pages, form a new trail, make one’s own remarks and pass all this to a friend to use it on his “memex”.
In today’s easy access to the information on the World Wide Web we see the realization of Bush’s vision. Two creators of hypertext, Theodor Nelson and Douglas Engelbart openly acknowledge Bush’s As We May Think as the source of inspiration for their work. Sixty years after the
publication of this article the Internet became a container of endless information, which could be retrieved, exchanged and stored at any moment. The click on any links on one Web page “surfs” the user to other sites and pages and from there again someplace else. For example, it is possible to go from pages with the recent story of Terri Schiavo to the
pages about the law, the medicine, and the ethics. This is an example of what Bush had described as building “a trail […] through the maze of materials.” On the other side, the owner of the homepage can create links to the over related or even unrelated pages and send the interested visitors there. This way he joins “them [pages] into numerous
trails”(Bush). A complex example of the exchange of information and hypertext is Wikipedia, the first
“web-based, free content encyclopedia that is openly edited and freely readable” (Wikipedia). Currently it contains over one million articles and is open for anyone to edit. Theoretically, thanks to its wiki software, every user can contribute to the encyclopedia even in the form of vandalism. The articles could be extended and further
detailed through links in many languages and in many countries. Optically, almost every third word in each text has a blue font color, which means, that by clicking on that word the user “surfs” to another page which displays the information on that particular word. Generally below the main text with many links implanted in it, there are other links
with matters related to the article either from Wikipedia or from other pages on the World Wide Web. This encyclopedia is a “never-ending creative process and an experiment of a discourse in a global Internet context” (Wikipedia).
Why use Wikipedia as an example? Maybe, because of the Bush’s words: ”Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them […].” It evokes almost an eerie feeling to read about these “associative trails”, or hypertexts and
hyperlinks, as we call them today. The young generation of the industrial countries has grow up taking their existence for granted, though the World Wide Web is only fifteen years old. At the time of birth of the Web Bush’s idea of “associative trails” was already fifty-five years old.
 In his later work Bush wrote more directly about posting not only factual documentation, but also personal content, however this
notion already runs through As We May Think. Chat forums, blogs, discussions forums, they all bear traces of Bush’s idea of recording scientific and private thoughts and comments. Gordon Bell, a leading computer engineer at Microsoft, who studies telepresence, (being there without really being there, then) has tried to fulfill this Bush’s
vision by digitizing all the documents he has read or produced, CDs he has listened, emails he has written, and etc. and post them on his private and MyLifeBits Project sites. Bush had even foreseen “a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through enormous mass of the common record.”
Not every Internet user knows the names of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and Jerry Yang and David Filo, but everyone knows the names of their inventions: the search engines Google and Yahoo!
The way to the current standard of search engines was long and full of trial and errors. The first programs trying to scour the Internet in the beginning of the 90’ s were Archie, Veronica, Excite and WebCrawler. Yahoo! Was born in 1994, Google—four years later. What began as the
attempt to create ways to find information in the maze of the World Wide Web, ended up establishing a multimillion-dollar valuable businesses with two differing agendas. According to Michael S. Malone, contributor for Wired:
Google defines itself by technology. Brin and Page wake up every morning thinking about how a new algorithm or another rack of servers can be put to use to solve a particular problem. […] [Yahoo! is] “a chat room, a news service, a travel agent, an auction house, and a financial portal […].
Yahoo! is about everything. (122,123) Already sixty years ago, the theoretical user of “memex” was
confronted with an enormously extended bulk of the record. Logic, selection and the associative ways of work of human mind were Bush’s recipe to cure the problem of too much data. Modern search engines of the World Wide Web are not perfect. There is still a lot of work to be done. As M. S. Malone says, “Technological change and further customization
will be constant” (123). Those who work with information “would do well to take another look at his [Bush’s] vision and be as inspired to create new and innovative ways to gather and share information as other have been in the past” (Malone, E.).
The story of an Icarus who built a set of wings and attempted to fly has survived many centuries. We know that the man cannot fly in this way, but the legend still lives. We know that the idea of how the wings were build is not important, but rather it is the idea that a man should be able
to fly that is. And in the same way it is Bush’s vision that is important to us. It is not the surpassed idea of how the future “memex” should be build, but the idea of what it should be able to do and how it should be able to work that is Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” most important legacy.
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