As We May Think

1
As We May Think

• Vannevar Bush
• Presented by Eylon Caspi lteylon_at_eecsgt
• AJ Shankar ltaj_at_eecsgt
• Jingtao Wang ltjingtaow_at_eecsgt
• CS294 Reading The Classics 9/21/04

2
Agenda

• Background of Vannevar Bush andAs We May Think
• Technological Predictions
• Memex
• Limitations, Mispredictions, Lessons

3
Bio early year highlights

• Born on March 11, 1890, in Chelsea,
  Massachusetts.He had two sisters
• Educated at Tufts College, graduated in 1913
• Worked for General Electric and was laid off
  after a fire
• Started teaching position at Clark University in
  1914
• Earned his doctorate in engineering in less than
  a year from MIT
• Got faculty position at Tufts and later at MIT

4
Bio before WWII

• Analog computers at MIT, 1930s
• Differential analyzer 1930
• Claude Shannon was one of his student at that
  time
• Became the president of the Carnegie Institute in
  1937
• Microfilm Rapid Selectorat MIT, 1938-40

5
Bio during the war

• Created military research
• NDRC 40, OSRD 41-47
• Managed nuclear weapons research throughout the
  40s
• Manhattan Project
• Wrote science - the endless frontier 1945

6
Post-WWII

• Military consultant through 50s
• Recommended the creation of NSF
• The Vannevar Bush Award was created by the
  National Science Foundation in 1980
• After WWII, Bush continued to push for analogue
  computers (and against digital).

7
Bush on the Role of Science
Master the Environment
Knowledge, Communication
8
Technological Predictions

• Acquisition
• Instant photography, dictation
• Storage
• Unlimited image storage in microfilm
• Calculation / Automation
• Fully automatic accounting (point-of-sale,
  billing)
• Electric, fast Programmable Data entry
  job
• Symbolic logic math (à la Mathematica)
• Retrieval
• Rapid selection via index (card, film, or
  magnetic index)
• Information workstation Memex Hyperlinks
• Neural Interfaces

9
Bushs Memex

• Store publications, correspondence, personal
  work, on microfilm
• Items retrieved rapidly using index codes
• Builds on rapid selector
• Can annotate text with margin notes, comments
• Can construct a trail through the material and
  save it
• Roots of hypertext
• Acts as an external memory

10
Memex Limitations

• Basic unit of content is an image page
• No links to/from sub-text
• No digital content
• No keyword search, only TOC/index codes
• No networking
• No rapid info sharing, live docs, subscriber
  model
• Economical?
• Free libraries, starving academicians
• Technical challenges unsolved (dry photography,
  tape robots)
• Still no user trails today

11
Mispredictions

• Underestimated
• Rise of digital (Bushs student Claude Shannon)
• Networking (Rapid information sharing, content
  subscriber model)
• Role of science in entertainment (as driver,
  beneficiary)
• vannevar /van'_at_var/, n
• a bogus technological prediction,esp. due to
  overestimating a challenge