Vannevar Bush and memex

Information Systems History: What is History? What is is History? What is History? … and Why Even Bother with History?

“…In the first half of the twentieth century, similar utopian schemes, attempting to resurrect the dream that was encapsulated in the universal library in ancient Alexandria, were envisioned by H.G. Wells and Vannevar Bush (Muddiman, 1998;MacLeod, 2000;Houston and Harmon, 2007).…”

The history of information technology

“…The Memex would never have been practical with the specific technologies Bush proposed, but his vision of an extensible network of links tying together a huge database of text and graphics was a major influence on later work (Nyce & Kahn, 1991). Unusually for a non‐existent machine, the Memex has spawned an intimidatingly large body of literature, including the unusual honor of its own ARIST chapter (Houston & Harmon, 2007), the existence of which relieves me of the need to attempt a full reckoning here. The Memex, like Babbage, is one of those few topics in the history of information technology about which more research is not urgently needed.…”

Fifty years of research in artificial intelligence

“…As Smith (1980) points out, information systems practitioners had already recognized the relevance of research in AI to information processing in the early 1970s—as reflected, for instance, in the UNISIST (World Science Information System) 1971 report, published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Indeed, Smith traces the origins of this relationship back to the pioneering works of Alan Turing and Vannevar Bush in the 1940s on, respectively, machine intelligence and information retrieval (Houston & Harman, 2007). Later work by Licklider (1965, p. 36) focused explicitly on the “precognitive system” as a possible library of the future.…”