The other Memex: The tangled career of Vannevar Bush's Information Machine, The Rapid Selector

Abstract

Vannevar Bush had much less to do with modern information science and technology than has been thought. The histories of the two machines that were the closest Bush came to turning his famed Memex ideas into hardware, the Comparator and the Rapid Selector, dictate a reevaluation of Bush's direct influence. His 1930s attempts to build a device for America's codebreakers and to create a machine for the library of the future were less than successful. The story of the difficulties of the decades‐long projects help to place Bush and Memex in an historical context. © 1992 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Information Revolutions, the Information Society, and the Future of the History of Information Science

“…Nevertheless, it belonged firmly to the predigital era in that its recording, retrieval, and display mechanisms were based on automatically microfilming documents and searching the microfilm in new ways (Bush, 1991(Bush, [1945; Buckland, 1992). The Memex was the basis for an attempted realization by Ralph Shaw of a simplified version for literature searching that he called the Rapid Selector (Garfield, 1997(Garfield, -1978Burke, 1992). The Memex was conceptually more integrated and perhaps more nearly practical (though even Shaw's simplification in the form of the Rapid Selector eventually came to nothing) than Paul Otlet's multimedia work desk, the Mundothèque.…”

“…It is perhaps simplistic but convenient to see a steady technological progression from punched card and microfilm-based systems of information storage and retrieval, through several generations of computer and networked systems, to the most recent developments arising from the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web (Davis, 1937;Shaw, 1944;McCormick, 1963;Herner, 1984;Becker, 1984;Hirtle, 1989;C. Burke, 1992;Bowden, Hahn, & Williams, 1999;Griffiths & King, 2002;Rayward & Bowden, 2004;Williams, 2002aWilliams, , 2002bRenear & Palmer, 2009;Haig, 2011).…”

Vannevar Bush and memex

“…Second, Skagestad (1996, p. 224) has accused Bush of “actively opposing the ENIAC,” citing and exaggerating Kurzweil's (1990, p. 198) statement that Bush “apparently did not respond [to Norbert Weiner's letter proposing a digital computer].” However, Bush may have been too preoccupied with other matters or simply may have chosen not to respond. Third, according to Buckland (1992), Nyce and Kahn (1989, 1991), Burke (1991, 1992, 1994), and Zachary (1997), Bush may have tried to preserve a niche for human‐imitative analog technology in an increasingly digital world. This interpretation finds support in passages from Bush's (1967b, pp.…”

Interaction in information retrieval: Trends over time

“…About 30 years earlier, Vannevar Bush outlined a personal information system (the Memex) that would theoretically create chains of associations that would act as pathways to information and would resemble human thinking patterns (Burke, 1992). About 30 years earlier, Vannevar Bush outlined a personal information system (the Memex) that would theoretically create chains of associations that would act as pathways to information and would resemble human thinking patterns (Burke, 1992).…”