Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Over the weekend assignment. Hulick

             Reading the first article As We May Think, from The Atlantic, i was truly convinced that Vannevar Bush predicted the future. Bush talks about the benefits of this new technology to the post WWII society. He first introduced the Memex 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" which is a simplified description of the capabilities of the World Wide Wed. It wasn't until i read the second article that i began to understand the Bush's level of intelligence and his basic ideas on the computer that would eventually become reality. In the "Bush Symposium" reactions to the Memex, they agree that the capabilities of present technologies are still trying to perfect the Memex.  Bush was accurate in describing the future computing abilities, for example a computer being able to deliver results by "rapidly operating a typewriter". He also talked about what we can learn from computer storage, our own minds operate based on association, and our memories are transitory, but the computers abilities are extravagant in comparison, and go far beyond computing. 
          After Googling Memex, I first stumbled upon a Youtube video that animated the actions that Bush wrote about and showed a demonstration of how it would work. An article on digital humanities.org, claims that "technology [has] finally caught up with this vision". From what i imagined and what the animation showed, the capabilities of the Memex and more are all virtually possible on todays computers, for his ideas came as a precursor to hypertext and the World Wide Web. Additionally, i was extremely impressed by Bush's other contributions to society, including his active role in the invention of the atomic bomb. The commentary than goes into detail of Bush's design of the Memex, and the mechanical structure of it, running on the basis of accessing information by association, rather than numerical indexing, all ideas he had from relating to his own mind, which further shows the intelligence that went into his ideas. 

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