"As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush was a very intersting read and I really enjoyed seeing what his vision of the future would be. It amazed me how accurate many of his ideas have been in theory (although not int he way they have been relaized). His ideas about how information is indexed and stored to be retrieved later have been very accurate as we now read ebooks and find information online and see how it is related. The re-visited article that was written a few years later provides even more accurate claims and brings into account the early rise of digital technology that began at that time. While the ways in which Bush saw his ideas being relaized (with a large desk that stores information on microfilm) didn't happen as he expected, the general ideas have all been realized fairly accurately.
After reading "As We May Think," the re-visited version, and the commentary on it I performed a search on Google for "Memex." After searching through a few pages and reading a few articles I ended up at one called "Memex's Time Has Finally Come." This article talks about new technologies that are being created today that are continually realizing more parts of the Memex. It also tackles the idea of why an actual Memex has not ever been created. The article proposes several reasons for this including that technology has not yet reached a point where created a full Memex is possible, as well as there not really being a need for a full Memex. People don't seem to have much of a need to record every memory that they have, so a machine that records them all would not really be necessary. With the amount of information that would be brought in by such a device, adding "paths" (the modern day equivalent of tags) would be very difficult to do, and finding any relevant information would be a monumental task. The article continues on to talk about how contemporary services such as Evernote have come to work a bit as a Memex by allowing people to store thoughts and ideas online that can be accessed at any time from anywhere. With services such as Evernote and the amount of technology that we now carry with us the article argues that it will now be possible to tag and store information in a way similar to the Memex that has never been possible before.
Link to article: http://www.fastcompany.com/3000954/memexs-time-has-finally-come
I thought the point made about the reasons that the Memex never became reality were very interesting. While the concept of the device is fascinating, the interface as presented would be incredibly out of date and frustrating to use today. It seems like rather than a single integrated solution that the Memex suggests, the idea today is multiple independent pieces that together combine to fit all the functionality. The web for linking data, search engines for search, etc.
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