Memex: A Romantic Theoretical Tool for Thought
If my grandmother was into PKM, she would have had a Memex.
Last month, we discussed Vannevar Bush’s wild predictions on wearables and how cameras would extend our memories and cognition.
Those were not the only of his futuristic musings published in “As We May Think”1. Certainly, the most notable proposal from this article was Memex, a beautiful mix of Victorian furniture and modern technology that was never built.
Like beautiful vintage wooden secretary cabinets, Memex was supposed to become a specialised piece of furniture for advanced knowledge managers after WWII. It would have been an all-encompassing PKM workstation in the form of a wooden table equipped with the latest gadgets of the post-war era. You could have scored one of those at a local garage sale if at least one prototype of this theoretical device was ever built. Unfortunately, its inventor, Dr Vannevar Bush, never materialised his designs, and none ever saw the light of day. Despite this, Memex significantly contributed to the evolution of Tools for Thought (TfT), even if this contribution was purely theoretical. Looking at its proposed architecture today makes it look succulently steampunk. It could have become that obsolete object you’d scout on eBay, like a jukebox or a pinball machine. But, if that’s any consolation, Memex is in your pocket and the cloud today. It’s also beyond its inventor’s wildest dreams.
The Idea
The device’s name came from combining portions of (mem)ory and (ex)tender. It began with Vannevar Bush feeling overwhelmed by the influx of details he had to deal with, let alone intelligence he’d never be able to access. He complained about information transmission methods being outdated and inadequate for professional purposes. Since new material would simply draw in a data ocean, every new scientific research would provide ever-diminishing returns. We’ve discussed this topic on an early issue.
Like the brilliant minds of Alan Turing or Charles Babbage, he, too, understood that brute-forcing through the volumes of data was computationally prohibitive and, therefore, represented a dead-end. Little did he know that the information available to him then was not even a drop in the ocean of exponentially increasing amounts of data nowadays routinely emerging year after year. I wonder how stressed out he would be should he be our contemporary.
Although knowledge management made a giant leap forward backed by technology, it’s funny how today’s “Building a Second Brain”2 movement rehashes old ideas of memory and intellect augmentation, for which Memex was supposed to be a solution. Previous generations put high expectations on the tools of that time, such as index cards, corkboards and filing cabinets. Ethel E. Scholfield, “Filing department operation and control”, called such tools “automatic memory”. This echoes the belief that human brains are for generating ideas instead of storing them. Will we ever feel like we managed to control that information firehose?
Technical Aspects
Since its original proposal in 1945, the design underwent two revisions: one in 1959 and the other in 1967. Those revisions were the result of technological advancements of those respective periods. However, the main idea and the goal Bush tried to achieve remained unchanged.
Besides the wooden desk acting as the all-encompassing enclosure, there would be several core parts:
Two slanted touch screens would enable one of the fundamental innovations: the ability to see the origin of the information and the trails it leads to. So, not only would you be able to view a document, but you’d also be able to traverse their interconnected network. The user could operate those screens with a stylus!
A built-in camera could be used to ingest a picture into Memex for future retrieval.
A mechanised microfilm ribbon for storing images taken with the abovementioned camera.
A keyboard for punching in numbers to classify and retrieve information based on document IDs.
A joystick for navigating between related documents.
A voice recorder.
There was no point in plaguing this electro-mechanical device with programmed obsolescence. Bush envisioned all of its core parts to be swappable and user-upgradeable, much like what old white computer boxes used to be before everything became permanently part of a monolith motherboard as we kept marketing our laptops as something that would fit an envelope. At its core, Memex is a piece of furniture equipped with input/output peripherals, memory storage and controls. Think about it for a moment: wouldn’t that also fit the definition of a desktop computer? I think it’s getting pretty darn close.
Hyperlinks
The most essential concept of Memex is its use of hyperlinks (though not yet hypermedia). Bush referred to this as “associative indexing.” That “secret sauce” was precisely what made Memex worth mentioning.
Legendary scientists and engineers, such as Douglas Engelbart, Theodor H. Nelson, and Tim Berners-Lee, later used this idea to create hypertext and the Internet, which was then called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network).
A Wet Engineering Dream
For all his engineering experience, Vannevar Bush was still acting as a DIY tinkerer when he proposed the design of Memex. Although it was supposed to be operatable remotely, at its core, Memex was still a productivity desk like the ones I saw people constructing for themselves on YouTube. If he had an Instagram account, I’m sure he’d be salivating at the pictures of immersive productivity cabins with all the necessary distraction-free knowledge engineering items. If computers hadn’t been invented, Memex would have been that corporate tool into which clerks would scan files to build paperless offices and a go-to destination for researchers bringing home literature from the nearby library. But the history took a slightly different, although not too different, turn.
Bush, V. (1979). As we may think. ACM Sigpc Notes.