Authors: Alex Wright
B004R9Q09U EBOK (30 page)
The library, to which our professor probably turned, was enormous. Long banks of shelves contained tons of books, and yet it was supposed to be a working library and not a museum. He had to pore over cards, thumb pages, and delve by the hour. It was time-wasting and exasperating indeed.… The idea that one might have the contents of a thousand volumes located in a couple of cubic feet in a desk, so that by depressing a few keys one could have a given paper instantly projected before him, was regarded as the wildest sort of fancy.
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Bush saw libraries as one of the great unsolved technical challenges of his age, a domain that suffered from unfortunate neglect largely because so much of the nation’s technological agenda was driven by corporate interests. While Bush was by no means opposed to corporations in principle, he recognized that corporations were exerting a growing influence on the development of computing that left less and less room for the kind of human-centered, individualistic computing he envisioned. In later years, Bush would lament that the computer revolution had left libraries altogether behind. “The great digital machines of today have had their exciting proliferation because they could vitally aid business, because they could increase profits. The libraries still operate by horse-and-buggy methods, for there is no profit in libraries.”
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The dream of a digital library was still a long way off in the mid-1930s, when Bush began work on a new kind of computing device,
this time designed not for mathematical problem solving but for retrieving bits of information from a storehouse of data. His new Rapid Selector relied on the then-state-of-the-art storage technology of microfilm, allowing users to sift through large collections of documents from a single “terminal” with a projection screen housed in a large desk (unbeknownst to Bush, German inventor Emanuel Goldberg had designed a strikingly similar photoelectric microfilm selector in 1927
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). The machine, Bush wrote, “rapidly reviews items on a roll of film, selecting out desired items in accordance with a code. … In order to select items from a film, the roll is placed in the machine, a set of indices are placed in accordance with the code of the desired items, and the film is run through rapidly.” It was, essentially, a hopped-up microfilm reader with a built-in indexing facility.
By the late 1930s Bush had built four Rapid Selectors with funding from NCR and Kodak, but they were all plagued with technical problems; they were painfully slow and prone to malfunction. The available technology simply could not keep up with Bush’s evolving vision. It was during this period that he began to set his sights farther out on the horizon, rather than limiting his vision to the realm of the merely feasible.
In 1939 Bush drafted an essay provisionally entitled “Mechanization and the Record,” in which he penned almost the entire contents of “As We May Think.” The essay sprang in part from Bush’s experience as an administrator at MIT, where he witnessed firsthand the growing sprawl of scientific publications threatening to overwhelm the enterprises of science and engineering.
There is much evidence that we are becoming bogged down today, as specialization extends and research is quickened. There is a growing mountain of research results; the investigator is bombarded with the findings and conclusions of thousands of parallel workers which he cannot find time to grasp as they appear, let alone remember; specialization becomes increasingly necessary for genuine progress, and effort [
sic
] to bridge between disciplines correspondingly superficial. Still we adhere rather closely, in our professional efforts, to methods of revealing, transmitting, and reviewing results which are generations old, and now inadequate for their purpose.
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He went on to describe his proposed solution, revealing an almost complete vision of the Memex fully 6 years before he published “As We May Think.” With war on the horizon, however, Bush shelved his essay to focus on the more imminent threats facing the country. During the War, Bush applied his work on the Rapid Selector to a new machine custom-built for the Navy, the Comparator. The war provided him with the impetus to work through the technical kinks that had hamstrung the old Rapid Selector; by the war’s end, he had devised a fully functioning information retrieval device. As Bush began winding down his military career, he looked forward to bringing his machine into civilian deployment. “When peace returns,” he wrote, “it ought to be applied to something.” Turning his eye toward the most challenging information retrieval problems he could find, Bush approached the Federal Bureau of Investigation (whose fingerprint files were sprawling out of control), then the U.S. Patent Office (whose labyrinthine approval and record-keeping processes seemed to make it a ripe candidate for automation), and finally the Library of Congress, whose sprawling collection of books and documents presented an alluring test case.
Once again, the realities of technological constraints and institutional bureaucracies thwarted realization of his plans. The Library of Congress experiment proved at best a mixed success. Partly due to technical limitations (the mechanical film-reading apparatus performed more slowly than expected) but primarily due to the limitations of the manual indexing process, the project sputtered. In the process, Bush developed a crucial insight that would pave the way for the Memex: an antipathy toward manual indexing and toward librarians, who Bush increasingly saw as overly attached to manual processes and a potential obstacle to the user-driven information environment he envisioned.
In 1945 Bush dusted off his 1939 essay and revised it to produce “As We May Think,” publishing it first in
The Atlantic Monthly
and later in
Life
. The essay crystallized Bush’s first 12 years of thinking about how an ideal information retrieval device would work. The most frequently quoted passage in Bush’s essay crystallizes his prophetic vision:
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the Memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client’s interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior. The historian with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trailblazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciplines the entire scaffolding by which they were erected. Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores and consults the record of the race.
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The Memex would consist of five interlocking parts: (1) a microfilm document collection; (2) a workstation capable of displaying documents on a projection screen
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; (3) a mechanism for adding images to the microfilm store; (4) a code input mechanism for identifying and selecting individual records, or groups of records; and (5) associative trails, the conceptual linchpin of the system.
Drawing on his experience with the failures of the Rapid Selector, Bush insisted on the inefficiency of human indexing systems. “Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing,” he wrote. “One has to use rules as to which path will locate [data], and the rules are cumbersome.”
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The basic problem facing contemporary scholarship, as he saw it, was an expanding corpus of literature that “extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record.”
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The problem boiled down to, in his view, “the matter of selection,” the ability of readers to sift
through the available literature, find the most relevant materials, and retrieve them quickly for consultation. He believed that the practice of filing references alphabetically or numerically or by hierarchical classes of subjects forced the reader to operate within a set of cumbersome rules that required enormous cognitive overhead. The journey between documents—central to the scholar’s mission—required a constant process of zooming in and out. “Having found one item,” he wrote, “one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path.”
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Like Otlet, Bush sought to liberate the contents of books from the confines of physical volumes, breaking down the old hierarchy of the codex book in favor of a new kind of intertextuality that allowed for direct links between documents, removing the mediating filter of an external index. This kind of internal linking constituted a radical alternative to the deterministic indexing systems then (and still) prevalent in the scholarly publishing world, offering readers a fast path from one document to another. Otlet had called it a “link.” Bush called it an “associative trail.” He described it as a model of “selection by association, rather than by indexing.” By association he meant allowing authors (and readers) to insert explicit linkages between documents in a collection. “This is the essential feature of the Memex,” he wrote. “The process of tying two items together is the important thing.” Using associative trails, the user could forge a personal trail through any number of documents, creating an exteriorized representation of an internal thought process that other users could later see. “Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it to the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item.… He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.” Like ants leaving pheromone signals for their peers, the scholar could thus create a pathway for others to follow. The associative trail, then, represented a new kind of stigmergy.
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Bush’s vision differed from Otlet’s in two important respects. Otlet’s system relied not just on readers’ associations but on the reinforcing framework of a formal classification scheme. Bush eschewed
formal classification as needlessly artificial; indeed, he harbored a certain contempt for librarians and social scientists, believing instead that expert scientists could do a better job of self-organizing their own output than a troop of bibliographic bureaucrats. And unlike Otlet, Bush never envisioned the possibilities of penetrating the contents of the documents themselves. Otlet’s “links” worked within documents, whereas Bush’s “trails” worked only at the higher level of document references, never penetrating the texts themselves.
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While Otlet managed to construct a working model of his idea in the
Mundaneum
, Bush never actually imagined the Memex as a functioning device. “No memex could have been built when that article appeared,” Bush later acknowledged. It was from the beginning a conceptual stalking horse, more relevant as a philosophical guidepost than as a blueprint for an actual machine. Indeed, one could speculate that had the machine ever actually been built, its impact might actually have been reduced. With its microfilm reels, photographic copying plate, and forehead-mounted camera, a real-world Memex would today strike most of us as a Rube Goldberg contraption, a historical curiosity rather than the inspirational object it has become.
For all the legions of computer scientists who have since purported to embrace the Memex, few comprehend the depth of Bush’s antipathy toward the subsequent trajectory of the computer industry. While Bush’s Memex has often been associated with the rise of the modern computing industry, Bush never saw his machine as a tool for business. “I proposed a machine for personal use rather than the enormous computers which serve whole companies,” he wrote. “I suggested that it serve a man’s daily thoughts directly, fitting in with his normal thought processes.”
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Instead, large computer companies have often co-opted his vision in service of big-business agendas.
Paradoxically, even though Bush achieved his greatest results working in large governmental and academic institutions, he was a great believer in individual freedom and saw institutions primarily as the guarantors of environments in which individual genius could thrive. Bush’s focus on the individual user ran directly counter to the main trajectory of computing well into the 1970s, when the first personal computers began to emerge. Throughout most of this period,
large so-called mainframe computers operated in the back room, executing programs in support of deterministic business or scientific processes. Only a handful of specially trained operators ever had much contact with the machines. In the 1970s, so-called minicomputers gave individual offices and departments their first chance to interact directly with computers. The personal computer revolution of the late 1970s and 1980s brought more people into direct contact with computers, but even the modern personal computer is in many ways a descendant of the old command-and-control, militaristic systems. Behind the friendly graphical user interfaces and consumer-friendly marketing messages of the modern PC lie the vestige of exactly the kind of machine Bush did not want to build: a calculating machine, populated by hierarchical information systems like files and folders. Bush’s “associative trails” are nowhere to be found in the modern PC. As Nelson puts it, “Bush rejected indexing and discussed instead new forms of interwoven documents.”
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