The Memex
1945 · Imagined Desk · Work 512 of 1,871
A magazine illustration of 1945 of a desk with two slanting translucent screens set into its top, a keyboard between them, microfilm spools housed in the body of the desk, a lever at the side for calling up documents, the drawing in fine line and halftone, the magazine page cream and slightly toned, the page laid flat on a grey studio table, even flat light from directly above, the page alone in the frame.
- What it was used for
- The memex is a machine that was never built: Vannevar Bush described it in his essay "As We May Think" in the Atlantic Monthly of July 1945. Bush was then director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development; the editor's preface names some six thousand American scientists whose war work he had coordinated. Bush states the problem the machine was to solve: not so much that we publish unduly, but that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The memex is a device for one individual, in which he stores all his books, records and communications. On the desk top are slanting translucent screens for reading, a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers; inside is the stored material on improved microfilm. Otherwise, Bush writes, it looks like an ordinary desk.
- What was new
- What is new is the access. Bush writes that selection by association, rather than by indexing, may be mechanized — and qualifies it in the same breath: one cannot hope to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage. Out of the trails comes a form: encyclopedias delivered ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, and a new profession of trail blazers who establish useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. Bush deliberately sticks to known technology, microfilm and dry photography, and says himself that it might have been more striking to outline the future more spectacularly. Even the name is makeshift: coined at random, "memex" will do. If the user inserted 5,000 pages a day, Bush estimates, it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository.