#vannevar-bush — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #vannevar-bush, aggregated by home.social.
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Vannevar Bush wrote "As We May Think" in 1945. In it, he imagined a device called the "memex" that would store all of a person's books, records, and communications, and let them create trails of linked information between documents.
He was describing the internet, hypertext, and search engines decades before any of them existed.
If you want to understand where our entire digital world came from, this 80-year-old essay is still the clearest blueprint.
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@JensB @chronohh #trailblazer :: "There is a new profession of trail blazers, 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 disciples the entire scaffolding by
which they were erected." – Vannevar Bush 1945 -
Getting some Bell, Book & Candle vibes on #VannevarBush 's take on #stenography in 1945 lol
"The other element is found in the stenotype, that somewhat disconcerting device encountered usually at public meetings. A girl strokes its keys languidly & looks about the room & sometimes at the speaker with a disquieting gaze. From it emerges a typed strip... Later this strip is retyped into ordinary language, for in its nascent form it is intelligible only to the initiated."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ -
Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing.
-- Vannevar Bush -
The forgotten 80-year-old machine that shaped the internet – and could help us survive AI
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Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing.
-- Vannevar Bush⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #VannevarBush #Knowledge
⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Guangxi #China #LiRiver #LiJiang #TowerKarst #Geology
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Needed Vannevar Bush's quote on how secrecy in science works against national security in a discussion today, so I created a slide for it.
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Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing.
-- Vannevar Bush -
Update. "The Rise (and Fall?) of the National Science Foundation"
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-national-science-foundation
(#paywalled)"The #Trump administration’s assault on the #NSF represents precisely the kind of political interference [#VannevarBush] sought to prevent — one that threatens not only scientific progress but also the very foundation of academic freedom."
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Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing.
-- Vannevar Bush -
@dpiponi On the other hand, “As we may think” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think) is from 1945. There was something in the air at that time!
I would think that the war and the technological progress caused by it (including the atom bomb) let some people develop an extreme techno-optimism.
And Arthur C. Clarke's idea of using geostationary satellites for telecommunication (https://www.wired.com/2011/05/0525arthur-c-clarke-proposes-geostationary-satellites) is also from 1945!
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Bush proposed creation of the US National Science Foundation, in response to letter from FDR asking Bush
“…how to turn the ‘unique experiment of team-work and cooperation in coordinating scientific research and in applying existing scientific knowledge’ during WWll to the peaceful pursuit of scientific knowledge after the end of the war.”
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Context is incredibly important.
People read AWMT by Vannevar Bush in the Sept 1945 issue of LIFE — the most popular US magazine — less than two month after the Trinity test, and a month after Hiroshima.
Bush reported directly to FDR as the director of WWII R&D — including the Manhattan project. “He urges that men of science should then turn [from war] to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge.” [Atlantic, July 1945]
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As the edges of human knowledge are advanced, the total amount one must learn to be able to then contribute to further advancement grows. If there’s a proverbial mountain of knowledge, it grows taller as each contributor adds. If you start from the beach (at birth), wander inland in your early years of not-guided-by-you learning, and eventually decide to scale the mountain… well, it really matters in what epoch you happened to be born. Or maybe it doesn’t?
There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers-conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.
~ Vannevar Bush from, As We May Think
Bush played a complex role in the history of the United States. (It’s better if you form your own opinion about him and his work.) His short essay from about 80 years ago is these days seen by technophiles as heralding our own, current Internet and information age. In particular, a lot is read into Bush’s description of a desk which behaves like our modern Internet, information systems, and data processing. That’s fine. It’s like reading 80-year-old science fiction that became science fact.
Much more interesting to me is the point that with just a bit of squinting, it looks like nothing has changed in 80 years. Everything about this—the mountain of information, the tools [eg, Bush’s imagined desk, our internet], the people feeling overloaded, the specialization—feels fractal.
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The Internet's forgotten collaborative future:
https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen#Memex #VannevarBush #Dynabook #AlanKay #ProjectXanadu #TedNelson #Dynamicland #BretVictor
