Vannevar Bush

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Vannevar Bush

• LCC 2700 Intro to Computational Media

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Vannevar Bush

• Born in 1890
• Taught at MIT and built an analog computer for
  differential equations.
• Became Chairman of the National Defense Research
  Committee
• Worked on the Manhattan Project, and helped to
  found the National Science Foundation
• Disliked the humanities and social sciences, and
  consequentially did not have a historical
  understanding of his Memex.

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As we may think (1945)

• Expansion in human knowledge
• No way to navigate the fruits of print culture
• Memex machine
• Based on microfiche, not digital
• Architecture of associated trails, forged by
  experts

Bush was a leader of military research during
WWII, and an architect of the post-war
military-industrial-university research
establishment
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Bushs Proposed Memex (1945)
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Bushs Trail is a series of links(this passage
is also quoted by Nelson)

• When the user is building a trail, he names it,
  inserts the name in his code book, and taps it
  out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items
  to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing
  positions. ... The user taps a single key, and
  these items are permanently joined.
• Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items
  is in view, the other can be instantly recalled
  merely by tapping a button . Moreover when
  numerous items have been thus joined together to
  form a trail, they can be reviewedexactly as
  though the physical items had beenbound
  togethermore than this, for any item can be
  joined to numerous trails.

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Idea of the Trail, Trail-blazer

• Connected to American culture exploration of the
  frontier a defining experience and myth
• Googles success based on weighing links,
  calculating authority of the pointer
• Participatory nature of the digital medium
  supports multiple trail-blazers, criss-crossing,
  interconnnected trails
• Network architecture supports multiple routes
• Need for new indexing, segmenting, and linking
  structures to fully implement this concept

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The Legacy of Bush
Voice Recognition Head Mounted Camera My Lifes
Bits http//research.microsoft.com/ barc/MediaPre
sence/ MyLifeBits.aspx