data link Story: Looking Back On Three Decades Of Internet History

Looking Back ... Building a Trail of Interest A Galactic Network
Creating an Electronic Quilt Incalculable Impact

Building a Trail of Interest

But from very early on, a handful of visionaries realized the synergistic power that would come from someday putting a computer on everybody's desk, then gradually weaving them into one great matrix. In an age when computers were still identified in the public mind with punch cards and spinning reels of tape, some of the early fomenters of the information age showed stunning prescience.

As long ago as 1945, in The Atlantic Monthly, Dr. Vannevar Bush, the engineer, educator and government research adviser, came up with the basic idea of the personal computer, a device he called the memex -- a mechanical extension of human memory. Never mind that it was as big as a desk and that it stored all your documents, including encyclopedias and reference libraries, on super-fine-grained microfilm shuffled by nimble mechanical fingers and projected onto translucent screens.

Though embodied in the clunky technologies of the time, the memex would work something like an associative memory -- or, less grandiosely, a relational database. A user researching the history of the bow and arrow might start by calling up an encyclopedia article. When he found another relevant passage in a book, he would link the documents with a few keystrokes, encoding them with crude hyperlinks, and even add his own annotations. "Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him," Bush wrote.

To his credit, Bush also speculated that going beyond "dry photography," the data might be stored as magnetized dots on metallic sheets using the technology that already existed for recording voices on spools of wire. And for entering data, he even envisioned the scanner, an outgrowth of the radio facsimile machines that already existed in his day.

The big thing Bush missed was electronic networking. He imagined the researcher conferring with someone a few years later who wanted to incorporate the bow-and-arrow material into his own study on technology. "He sets a reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out and passes it to his friend for insertion in his own memex," he wrote, "there to be linked into the more general trail." He had invented the World Wide Web with messengers on bicycles in place of high-speed digital T-3 lines.

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data link, October 1999.
data link acknowledges the source of this article, HPCwire, the electronic news magazine for high-performance computing. Used with permission.