From the Editor in Chief: A Retrospective on "As We May Think"

T his month marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of Vannevar Bush's seminal Atlantic Monthly article, " As We May Think. " 1 At the time, Bush was the director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development for the World War II effort; his peacetime jobs, both before and after the war, were as president of the Carnegie Institute and Dean of Engineering at MIT. In his article, Bush discussed science's impact on fighting the war and then turned his attention to what goals (physical) scientists should pursue in the aftermath. Noting that scientists had become particularly good at creating new knowledge , he argued that a key activity of the postwar effort should be to create tools to facilitate access to such knowledge. He described the memex, " a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. " In modern terms, a memex was a desk-like personal workstation through which users could view documents. It was controlled by a keyboard, buttons, and levers — Bush was already considering the issue of effective user interface. Vision Bush's vision included a fair number of the concepts that have come to dominate the ways we access information. The memex was a personal workstation; 60 years later, we're still in the personal workstation era, although we can now imagine a time of ubiquitous, untethered computing, more personalized devices, and nonvisually centered mechanisms. Photography was primarily a wet process in his day, but Bush foresaw that facsimile technology could be combined with Xero-graphy to make hardcopy images (fundamentally the technology behind laser printers). He also understood machines' potential for following programs and producing simulations and logical deductions (the latter being an early perspective on databases and artificial intelligence). One of Bush's most significant insights was the importance of being able to navigate through the encyclopedia of memex's information. To that end, he invented explicit links, an idea that led to hypertext and, more familiarly, links in HTML documents. Perhaps Bush's most important insight was that we could use machines to augment human cognitive processes. This has since been so incorporated into the intellectual fabric that it now hardly seems special, but in 1945, machines were devices that substituted for muscle. Bush's vision was even different from the Capekian notion of humanoid robotics. …