Rejoinder to Dean Koenig's letter

Letters to the Editor Bush’s Contribution to the Vision of Electronic Information Systems Sir: In his article, “Emanuel Goldberg, Electronic Document Retrieval, and Vannevar Bush’s Memex” Professor Buckland (1992) has performed a signal service in articulating Gold- berg’s much overlooked contributions and in elucidating the context of Bush’s (1945) famous Memex and “As We May Think” article. His article gives us a far broader view of some of the antecedents of post-war information technology devel- opment, and a better sense of where we have come from. However, I would submit that it is not so much that Bush is remembered and honored for the Memex, but that the Memex is remembered, often somewhat inaccurately it appears, as a token of the larger ideas in “As We May Think” and that it is for those larger ideas, also admittedly sometimes inaccurately rendered, that Bush is remembered and honored. As Linda Smith’s (1981) piece points out, a citation content analysis reveals that comparatively few of the citations to Bush’s article are to his notion of a personal informtion sys- tem (the memex), still fewer to his notion of the memex as hardware. What “As We May Think” is remembered for is primarily the combination of high density storage and electronic ma- nipulation of data. Bush spends the bulk of the article, sec- tions one through five, of eight rather conveniently numbered and rather equal sized sections, primarily discussing the capa- bilities and the advances of electronic technology, before he ever gets to the memex in sections six and seven. In section one Bush discusses thermionic tubes, cathode ray tubes, relays and automatic telephone exchanges, and con- cludes with “The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.” The bulk of section two, is devoted to electronic recording and transmission, including magnetic wire recording and fac- simile transmission, and he makes it clear that he expects substantial improvement. Of facsimile he says “It would be a brave man who would predict that such a process will remain clumsy, slow, and faulty in detail.” In section three he com- mences by discussing the possible combination of the Bell Laboratories Voder and Vocoder* with court stenographic technology to produce voice input to information devices in a fashion that is quite clearly distinct from analog recording (we still haven’t made much progress there). He then proceeds to discuss recently developed cosmic ray counting devices that could handle 100,000 impulses per second, and says “The ad- vanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature and they will perform at 100 times present speeds or more. In section four he posits far more advanced arithmeti- cal machines, “machines for enhanced analysis.” In section *The Voder generated speech sounds from key input (the keys represented sounds not letters), and the vocoder, using a micro- phone as input, reversed the process and produced key movement. 0 1992 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. five, he discusses selection devices and the potential use of thermionic tube based devices. He also discusses storage ca- pability and proposes “magnetic dots on a steel sheet.” Ilc finishes by discussing the possibility of being “able to key one sheet of a million before an operator in a second or two with the possibility of then adding notes thereto,” and “One might, for example, speak to a microphone.. . and thus make his selections.” The memex when it arrives in section six and seven, and as it is described, is rather something of an anti-climax. Part of the reason for that may lie in the history of the article. As Nyce and Kahn (1989) point out, the first draft of the article was written as early as 1939. Bush had reservations about where it should appear, the war intervened, and it was rewrit- ten before it appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945. One suspects that sections one through five were much expanded, and that expansion incorporated much of what Bush had learned and been involved with during the war, and that sec- tions six and seven remained largely unchanged. Bush’s phrase “thermionic tubes capable of controlling potent forces under the guidance of less power than a mosquito uses to vibrate his wings” for example, conjures up and almost certainly derives from the WWII developments of the VT (variable time) deto- nated warhead for anti-aircraft shells, and the acoustic tor- pedo. Another part of the reason, as Bush makes clear, is that in his memex, he is trying to describe a device more or less obtainable within the available technology, and thus make his visions more real and palpable, and his call for physicists to devote their efforts to information technology more persua- sive, by describing what comparative marvels could be accom- plished with only minor extensions to existing technology. What Bush is remembered for is the visions he sets out in sections one through five, and again in section eight where he discusses the possibility of communicating information elec- tronically directly to the brain, not so much for the memex of sections six and seven. It is, however, quite likely that in fact those of us who have been perceiving Bush’s importance in that fashion may have been reading too much into his discus- sion of electronic information technology. “Magnetic dots,” not magnetic spots, for example, sound very much like binary technology. However, Nyce and Kahn (1989) point out that when one analyzes Bush’s later writings and correspondence, digital rather than analog electronic devices do not appear to have loomed large upon his horizon. Nonetheless the following facts are clear: l “As We May Think” is more about electronic infor- mation technology than it is about microform de- vices in the Goldberg tradition. The article contains a number of very compelling visions* of the future of information technology, and most of those visions are electronic: *and at least one clunker. In discussing the potential of ther- mionic tube switching in comparison to mechanical switching he says, “No one would wish to spend the money necessary to make this change in the telephone system, but the general idea is appli- cable elsewhere.” JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE. 43(10):676-682, CCC 0002-8231/92/010676-07