As We May Think (1945) | Hacker News Reader

As We May Think (1945)

theatlantic.com

106 pointsJumpCrisscross34 comments

The most interesting thing about this article, to me, is that part 7 is often skimmed and not understood. Bush describes the user building his own 'trail' of linked item (books, articles, etc.) and being able to store that trail. He was not envisaging the web as we have it (consisting of links chosen by authors), but of the ability to form your own web of connections.

It's in section 8 that he describes the something similar to the web. I've always felt that better tools could be built for part 7.

How many times have I lost the thread of thought while surfing the web and been forced to re-search to find my way back?

Yes.

I also regret that we don't have Ted Nelson's original idea for hypertext, in which incoming links were also visible by default.

Of course in reality the spammers would have a field day with that -- every popular page would have about a jillion incoming links for dubious pharmaceuticals and dodgy gambling operations, but still, one can dream.

Can't you hack that together with a [link:] query on Google? You can even use Google's ordering algorithm as a spam filter.

Interesting idea. It might make a nice plugin, assuming it's can be done in accordance with Google's TOS.

I haven't looked at that part of it for a while, but I remember there are restrictions on automated queries. Making the user click a button or something might get around that.

link: has been incomplete for years and years; when I heard of link: I thought it'd be so awesome, and then I encountered the brutal reality...

You can approximate something similar though on sites you control: set Google Analytics to record referring URLs and after a few time-units, dump the set per-page to construct a manual trackback.

Don't do this if you care anything about SEO. It will make your site appear to Google as part of a reciprocal link scheme, and it will get nuked from the index.

Marking the links as rel="nofollow" should prevent that from happening, shouldn't it?

Well, I was kind of assuming that you would be doing a little filtering out of the worst links - only substantive discussions of your page.

I have also wondered a lot about the incompleteness of "link:<mywebsitesite>" command. Google's documentation is not very elaborate regarding that. Google webmaster on the other hand gives a more complete link of external links to the site.

My guess its deliberately incomplete because of:

1) Google's competitor search engines (bing, blekko, duckduckgo) to not easily get Google's Internet graph.

2) Competing websites should not get each other's complete link graph.

Hey thanks! His ideas are interesting. "HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT— ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management". Would be useful, for sure.

I recently re-read his book Literary Machines after first reading it in the late 80s, and it struck me how simultaneously visionary and impractical his ideas were. His version of the web was centralized(), with the organisation running it covering its costs by franchising-out access points. yes, it had transclusion and versioning, but it also had rights management and automatic billing for quoting (transcluding) other people's work - all imposed by a central authority that owned the entire "web".

( it had to be centralised, otherwise the contract necessary for transclusion would not work in the real world)

Nelson is a very smart visionary, but I'm glad we ended-up with the messy, decentralised web we have today.

Obligatory link to The Curse of Xanadu at Wired, back in the day: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html. A real hacker nightmare story.

Awesome, that is interesting - I was not aware of that. I was looking around to see if I could find his book. I found a PDF - don't think it's the entirety - but will give it a read this weekend.

I wonder if some kind of medium ground could be put together. Thanks for that article, I'll check that out!

The book is hard to get hold of now. There are used copies on Amazon, but the prices are stupidly high. I bought a dead-tree edition from Eastgate Systems [1] a few years ago at a reasonable price, but it seems to be out of stock now.

[1] http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/LiteraryMachines.html

It is called TrackBack and it is a standard feature on blogs.

Yeah, I know about trackback (and trackback spam).

Nelson's version didn't require any special stuff, though. His idea of the hyperlink was bidirectional by default. He also had a scheme that would let you "transclude" text from other documents. This was different from quoting, in that the transcluded text was live (i.e., when the original source changed, the transcluded text in the other document would also change).

> He also had a scheme that would let you "transclude" text from other documents.

And even at the time, he planned to modify copyright law to allow this.

(I believe launching a successful land war in Asia was next on his list.)

TrailMeme [http://trailmeme.com/] is a step in this direction.

This reminds me of a browser extension I'd like to see. It could watch over your browsing and construct a graph of the sites you've visited, then allow you to spatially navigate your navigations. Throw in some auto-categorization and you have a nicely organized breadcrumb trail that you can then use to explore new spaces & fill in gaps in your knowledge.

^This! When I'm jumping into a new area, I go through the basics, and then it starts to get hard to see what I've already covered. Something that would make it easier to see that I've missed a section due to the "Squirrel" effect, or just the density of what I have seen, would be a major help.

The Office of Scientific Research and Development was essentially the civilian side of the Manhattan Project. Interestingly this article was published in the same month as Trinity, at which Vannevar Bush was present. The Manhattan Project itself was still a tightly held secret at this point.

A contemporary picture of Bush: http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=3dcd2f9a3fce36...

Vannevar Bush is an absolutely incredible guy. If you want to understand the origins of the modern academic research complex and Bush's role in building it definitely check out 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' by Richard Rhodes.

It is the classic essay written about the future in 1945. We got fundamentals (of computing age) for topics like hyperlinks, information retrieval etc. in this article.

I guess I've read somewhere that people like Doug Englebart (father of computer mouse) were inspired by this essay and made that vision into reality.

If Bush's essay is the start of a trail, then Englebart's "Mother Of All Demos" is the next waypoint:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs

This is great, critical history to absorb about our industry.

(As an aside, I feel that the introduction of the original iPhone is in some ways a spiritual successor to Englebart's demo.)

Vannevar Bush's idea for the PC (and web) as an aid to memory is coming true big time. For better or worse, it's often those who already well educated who benefit the most.

Doug Engelbart Institute posted a link to videos and transcripts of the Oct 1995 Brown / MIT Vannevar Bush symposium celebrating the 50th anniversary of AWMT:

"As We May Think: A Celebration of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Vision, An Examination of What Has Been Accomplished, and What Remains to Be Done"

Excellent talks and panels with Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Andy van Dam, Alan Kay, Tim Berners-Lee, Paul Kahn, Lee Sproul, Raj Reddy, Michael Lesk, Bob Kahn, and others.

Douglas Adams was the dinner speaker (great talk, unfortunately no video or audio record).

http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush-symposium....

"The event was in fact an exhibition of Bush's legacy, a self-referential, interweaving (intertwingling, Ted Nelson would say) of all the themes - social, technological, and psychological - from Bush's paper. In the course of two days it became very clear how deep and ambitious - socially and culturally - Bush's most central ideas were. At every turn we were reminded that Bush was writing about how fundamentally new intellectual practices could change the entire landscape of human social life. Bush's vision was not just about hypertext, or data management, or information retrieval, let alone about microfilm or calculating machines; rather, it was about extending the power of human beings by giving them radically new ways of working together.

The goal of fundamentally changing how we work in order to address pressing human problems continued to be central throughout the development of Bush's legacy in the '60s and '70s, most obviously in the work of Engelbart, Nelson, and Kay. Its continued evidence throughout the symposium - even (perhaps most notably)in the presentation of Tim Berners-Lee, the youngest speaker - and the warm response of the audience made it clear that this optimistic social agenda still resonates. It seems that we are not too jaded, skeptical, or post-modern to believe, 50 years later, that technology can bring us 'a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge', one that will promote 'the application of science to the needs and desires of man' ('As We May Think')."

from http://www.cs.brown.edu/memex/Bush_Symposium_Interact.html

Old School! Nice to see Bush sprouting up on Hacker News!

@Turing_Machine - stay tuned. 2-way public hyperlinks might just be on their way : )

Is there any evidence that this article actually informed or inspired the pioneering work on hypertext systems (Xanadu, HES, Intermedia, etc)? Or was it brought in later to add historical credibility to the idea? IN would be intersting to see a citation history.

Its a great article, though, and Vannevar Bush was an impressive guy.

AWMT was certainly a hot topic and required course reading from 1968 on... I was a student of Andy van Dam's in that era and early user of the Hypertext Editing System developed at Brown with Ted Nelson.

Certainly for Intermedia and Nelson's "Literary Machines" era; Nelson published a full copy of AWMT in his 1980 book.

Doug Engelbart frequently tells the story of reading "As We May Think" as an enlisted radar technician in a thatched hut Red Cross Library in 1945 (see Belinda Barnet link below)

Ted Nelson said in an Aug 2000 telephone interview:

"I think I read it when it came out in 1945. Since I was eight my memory is necessarily incomplete. Everyone else who would have been in the family is now deceased. But we did subscribe to the Atlantic Monthly and I think there's a very good chance I read it at that time." ~ Ted Nelson

http://illuminationgallery.net/wr/hypertext/nelson.html

Belinda Barnet's PhD thesis on the intellectual history of hypertext will be published as a book early next year, including extensive interviews with Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Andy van Dam.

She writes frequently on the subject, often published in Digital Humanities Quarterly: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/

For a good 2008 paper by Belinda and Darren Toffs, on Bush, Engelbart and Nelson see:

Too Dimensional: Literary and Technical Images of Potentiality in the History of Hypertext

http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackw...

A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.

Thanks, very interesting. And some useful links.

I wrote my masters dissertation on hypermedia back in 1991, and I remember that references to AWMT kept appearing in papers I was reading. When I read it I could see how it related to hypermedia as it existed in the early nineties, but 1945 seemed rather distant and the paper seemed to stand on its own, rather than being the start of something. I haven't thought about it since, but it now seems obvious that this was because of my lack of knowledge at the time. I wasn't aware then of Englebart's work, for example.

I re-read Literary Machines only last year, but had completely forgotten that Nelson included AWMT in it. I may pull it off the bookshelf again tonight.

I think the trail led from Doug Engelbart and folk who were directly or indirectly influenced by his 1968 Demo as well as Ted Nelson and Computer Lib / Literary Machines.

Doug donated his personal copy of "As We May Think" with marginal notes to the Computer History Museum (you can download a copy). He wrote about Bush's influence in "Augmenting Human Intelligence" (1962) and talked about it in a Stanford University Oral History interview.

See http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush-symposium....

This pops up in front of me every couple years and I always get something new out of it each time.

I can't tell you how many times I had to read this in college. It was the first text we read in at least 5 of my courses my junior year.

Both classic and ahead of his time.

"Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century" (1999 MIT Press)is an excellent biography of Bush by G. Pascal Zachary.

Vennaver Bush invented the blogosphere :-)

> The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.

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