How One Man Predicted the Internet Before Computers
And What Does It Mean For Today?
The year is 1945. The US, freshly winning the war, now has significant capacity for science without as clear of a goal. They could continue constructive weapons of mass destruction, and they will, but the effort need not be as centralized or focused without soldiers actively in trenches. Not wanting this research capacity to diffuse into meaninglessness, the head the wartime scientific effort, Vannevar Bush, publishes his manifesto for American science in the Atlantic: As We May Think.
In this piece he aims to refocus scientists on research toward a ‘memex’ as he calls it. This device is in many ways similar to the modern desktop computer: it stores a record of a person’s intellectual ‘trails’ which can be shared and searched freely. The vision is that such a device could help scientists keep up with the fire-hydrant of research that was regularly published by the thousands of scientists that had been recently funded by the government.
Eighteen years later, Doug Englebart wrote a letter thanking Bush for the article’s contribution to his thoughts on augmenting human intellect. Here, Englebart reframes Bush’s vision as a framework for making humans more efficient in intellectual pursuits in general. To Englebart, this is mostly about symbol manipulation: being able to read, write, edit, and send files in a maximally convenient way. Englebart went on to invent the mouse, hyperlinks, and the 2D graphical interface based on these ideas.
This arc of history doesn’t stop with Englebart, however. In the 1990s, the internet enabled the efficient sharing discussed by Bush. A few years later, Google’s PageRank algorithm satisfied Bush’s idea of indexing ideas by association in order to effectively solve the problem of selection.
One curious grain of inspiration I discovered in my reading of Bush’s article had to do with trails. He imagined ‘trails’ of ideas, one leading to the next, and constantly branching down interesting nooks. Trails, in my view, are reasonably adjacent to one’s search history on the internet. But Bush goes a step forward, envisioning a “new profession of trail blazers those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.”
So why don’t we simply share search histories with each other? Because the internet is messy and imperfect. No two idea journeys are the same. Even if they could be in theory, we rely on the browser’s back button because we constantly make mistakes; we can’t know if websites have the information we need before we open them.
Still, maybe Bush was onto something. How frustrating is it to pave new trails on the internet. Compare the experience of learning and researching on the internet versus scrolling Twitter or TikTok. How nice would it be if we had instant curation systems that pre-determined our journey on the internet based on our goals.
Even before Bush and Englebart, there was known to be value in better connecting the thoughts of individual with the knowledge bank of society. Ralph Waldo Emerson described how we are all fragments “as the hand is divided into fingers” of the greater intellect of our species. With new technology to better handle fundamental units of symbol manipulation — indexing, selection, writing, etc — what other tools might exist for augmenting human intellect. Artificial Intelligence will surely be important, as it accomplishes each of these tasks with accuracy and speed. But its specific insertion into our lives is yet to be determined by the trail blazers of history to be made.
