Vannevar Bush

Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) was an American engineer and public-servant who worked on many major scientific and military projects for the United States government - including the development of the atomic bomb and the creation of analogue computers.

In his 1945 essay As We May Think, Bush described a machine, which he dubbed the memex, intended to allow an individual to create trails of thought, linking ideas and concepts for storage, later retrieval and collaboration. While his memex machine was never built, it contained many of the ideas and concepts related to the concept of hypermedia, which, today is a major part of multimedia theory.

The Memex

The memex machine was envisaged as a desk containing a library of microfilm records, high-resolution cameras and projectors and an electro-mechanical system to to navigate the library.

Bush described his memex machine as:

…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 (Bush, 1945).

The user would be able to purchase microfilm libraries holding books, reference materials or newspapers for insertion to their memex library; as well as recording their own photographs, correspondence and notes through a photographic system.

The Memex machine as drawn in in As We May Think

The greatest innovation however, was that of associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another (Bush, 1945). He described these references as creating a trail of thoughts which could be stored, retrieved years later and reproduced photographically to be passed on to be inserted to another users memex library.

While the memex was never constructed, the concepts laid down in As We May Think later played a role in influencing the ideas of Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson, who invented many of the modern concepts of hypertext and hypermedia. These concepts in turn helped form the basis of the World Wide Web.

Criticisms of the Memex Concept

Despite the impact the memex concept had on later thinkers, there are some critics of Bush’s concepts. One of these critics Professor Michael Buckland states in his article, Electronic Document Retrieval, And Vannevar Bush’s Memex, that Bush’s ideas were neither original or practical (Buckland, 1992).

One claim made by Buckland in this paper deals with Bush’s lack of information science knowledge. In response to a statement in As We May Think, Buckland goes on to state:

Bush declared, in effect, that retrieval should not function as conventional indexes do but as the human brain does, i.e. “as we may think.” Bush thought that the creation of arbitrary associations between individual records was the basis of memory, so he wanted a “mem(ory-)ex”, or “Memex instead of index. The result was a personalized, but superficial and inherently self-defeating design (Buckland, 1992).