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'As We May Think' at 65

Published: 01 March 2010 Publication History

Abstract

At 65 'As We May Think' has reached its pensionable age but as yet is showing no signs of retiring. As a researcher within the Web Science and Hypertext domains, and as a member of SIGWEB, I already know who Vannevar Bush is and understand the importance of his work to my field. I know that he proposed the MEMEX, an analogue information system using microfilm which is seen as the distant forerunner to our current hypertext systems, and indeed, the World Wide Web. Luminaries such as Theodor Holm Nelson and Doug Engelbart have credited Bush as being the inspiration for their own work in hypertext and distributed systems such as the Web. So what more can we say about Vannevar Bush and the work which spurred the creation of the Hypertext field. It seems to me that Bush's main ideas have never been more important than they are today. Indeed, the idea of association and its importance for the automation and augmentation of human thought and cognition still has resonance even today. Indeed, these concepts and the solutions they imply have become even more important than when they where first conceived, and throughout the 50s and 60s.

References

[1]
Bush, V. 1996. As we may think. interactions 3, 2, 35--46.
[2]
Levy, D. M. 2005. To grow in wisdom: vannevar bush, information overload, and the life of leisure. In JCDL '05: Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 281--286.
[3]
Oinas-Kukkonen, H. 2007. From bush to engelbart: 'slowly, some little bells were ringing'. IEEE Ann. Hist. Comput. 29, 2, 31--39.
[4]
Owens, L. 1991. Vannevar bush and the differential analyzer: the text and context of an early computer. 3--38.
[5]
Simpson, R., Renear, A., Mylonas, E., and van Dam, A. 1996. 50 years after "as we may think": the brown/mit vannevar bush symposium. interactions 3, 2, 47--67.
[6]
Waldrop, M. M. 2001. The dream machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the revolution that made computing personal. Viking, New York.
[7]
Zachary, G. P. 1997. Endless frontier: Vannevar Bush, engineer of the American Century. Free Press, New York.

Cited By

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  • (2021)Reframing a Novel Decentralized Knowledge Management Concept as a Desirable Vision: As We May Realize the MemexSustainability10.3390/su1307403813:7(4038)Online publication date: 5-Apr-2021
  • (2010)Past visions of hypertext and their influence on us todayProceedings of the 21st ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia10.1145/1810617.1810666(315-315)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2010

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGWEB Newsletter
ACM SIGWEB Newsletter  Volume 2010, Issue Spring
Spring 2010
26 pages
ISSN:1931-1745
EISSN:1931-1435
DOI:10.1145/1721871
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 March 2010
Published in SIGWEB Volume 2010, Issue Spring

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Cited By

View all
  • (2021)Reframing a Novel Decentralized Knowledge Management Concept as a Desirable Vision: As We May Realize the MemexSustainability10.3390/su1307403813:7(4038)Online publication date: 5-Apr-2021
  • (2010)Past visions of hypertext and their influence on us todayProceedings of the 21st ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia10.1145/1810617.1810666(315-315)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2010

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