After reading
the articles “As We May Think” and “Memex Revisited” by Vannevar Bush and the
reactions to a conference, I then looked up Memex on google. One thing that came up that sparked by interest
was a youtube video of an animated version of the Memex showing its
capabilities and the way it works. The
recording is of Macromedia Director to commemorate the 50th anniversary
of the “As We May Think” article. The
application was built by Dynamic Diagrams and shown at the ACM SIGIR
conference. The video shows a person
looking up and comparing articles, never loosing their trail of information,
adding own information to the works found, and sharing their work with others
at a later date. These are all functions
of modern day computers: “googling” information, typing up own information in
applications such as Word, saving the information written, and sharing work
through email or online message. The
video also showed the inside functions of the Memex and how it would work
technologically. It is fascinating to me that someone could
have predicted or planned out an early version of a computer without having the
technology to do so at the present time.
Ironically, I used that same video as my example! It must be the most commonly watched video, or maybe even the most accurate depiction. I personally thought it was interesting because the device was so large compared to what one would call the modern day memex: the world wide web. It definitely is fascinating that someone predicted this device, but at the same time there are still a lot of differences between the memex and the world wide web.
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