As we may think-英文文献.pdf

“As We May Think” Vannevar Bush CS294-6 Reading The Classics 9/21/04 Notes by: Eylon Caspi eylon@ AJ Shankar aj@ Jingtao Wang jingtaow@ In a 1945 paper [1] for the popular press, Vannevar Bush proposed that science be put to use in organizing the vast record of human knowledge. Inspired by his previous work in microfilm mass storage, Bush envisioned an information workstation—the memex —capable of storing, navigating, and annotating an entire library’s worth of information. His idea of push-button linking between documents is commonly held to be the forefather of modern hypertext. However, Bush’s vision lacked several key innovations present in today’s information workstations, including searchable, digital content and rapid information sharing on a network. Bush tells a masterful story of technology’s state of the art in 1945 and of taking its trends to their logical conclusion, revealing how his vision was both guided by and limited by that technology. This document shall explore and summarize Bush the man, the contributions and limitations of his paper “As We May Think,” and our class discussion thereof. We begin with (1) a biography of Bush and (2) a discussion of his vision for organizing the human record. We discuss in turn Bush’s predictions on technology for (3) information acquisition, mass storage, (4) automation, and (5) information retrieval, and the culmination of those technologies in (6) the memex. We then discuss (7) the limitations of the memex and of Bush’s vision at large. 1. Bush Biography 1 We give a brief introduction of Bush’s life , so as to establish his personal background motivating “As We May Think.” 1.1 Bush’s Early Life