The Individual and the "Intellectual Globe"

Abstract

In the Atlantic Monthly of July 1945, Vannevar Bush, the American engineer and wartime science advisor to the president, proposed that information derived from various sources could be conveniently stored on microfilm. He imagined a machine that stored and retrieved reels of specially selected information: >Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is 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. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.1< The storage capacity of the memex would be considerable: “Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mech-anism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository.”2 On this basis, Bush declared that “The Encyclopaedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk.”3 However, this is not what he intended to do because he did not envisage the memex as a new way of storing older selections and arrangements of information and knowledge. Instead, he regarded it a personal, even a private device in the battle against information overload—a problem not adequately addressed, in his opinion, by library catalogues, or encyclopedias and their classification and organization of subjects.4 Bush was preoccupied with the needs of individuals (such as himself) who wanted to keep track of their own information and thoughts gathered for specific purposes.