The Memex of Vannevar Bush

I found an article, “The Memex of Vannevar Bush,” from a website called History of Computers, hardware, software, and the Internet. I think it’s only fitting to find an article about Bush in this website because a lot of Bush’s visions came to be true with the development of these systems.

This article gives a brief history of Bush and describes the two articles he wrote on his vision of the Memex. Emanual Golderg, Paul Otlot, and Ted Nelson are also mentioned in this article and I thought that was interesting because they were apart of the symposium article we read. These figures credited Bush as their main influence in the development of hypertext and their other work within the industry. I found this article interesting because it summarized all of the readings we read for this article very well and even showed pictures of Bush on the cover of Life and the original illustration of the Memex Life developed. 

“The Memex of Vannevar Bush” says that the most important idea developed by Bush was the idea of the associative trail because it is now available today under what is known under hypertext. I disagree with this argument because I believe the most important concept of the Memex is being able to have information right there at your fingertips. Although, the physical Memex was never developed, the concept of the Memex was developed through cell phones. Bush thought it was important that people will have knowledge right away and make it simple and fast and with cell phones you can do a simple Google search and the information is right there. The cell phone is a smaller and portable version of the Memex desk Bush envisioned. 

Also, the article says; Bush never described in his article anything related to the idea of automated searches or any metadata scheme. I believe that if Bush were alive today he wouldn’t look back and regret what he did not include in the Memex. I think it was unfair of the author to point out what Bush did not include. Rather, we should focus on what Bush did envision and how most of his ideas for the Memex came true even though it did not look exactly what he imagined.

http://history-computer.com/Internet/Dreamers/Bush.html