Past visions of hypertext and their influence on us today

  • Authors:

  • Darren Lunn;Mark Bernstein;Cathy Marshall;J. Nathan Matias;James M. Nyce;Frank Tompa

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Manchester, Manchester, ON, Canada;Eastgate Systems, Watertown, MA, USA;Microsoft, Mountainview, CA, USA;World University Project, Cambridge, United Kingdom;Ball State University, Muncie, IN, USA;University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 21st ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

In July 1945, Vannevar Bush published the seminal paper As We May Think in Atlantic Monthly [2]. In this paper Bush proposed MEMEX, a device where information and records could be stored and linked together through 'trails' and 'associations' rather than 'artificial' indexing mechanisms. This idea is credited with being the inspiration, and precursor, for the modern World Wide Web (WWW) invented by Tim Berners-Lee, but as Harper notes, for most of the article, Bush was not concerned solely with the technical aspects of his MEMEX system. Instead, as with most computer visionaries, he was more concerned with how the computer system and its interfaces could help humanity [3]. We must therefore consider if, as a research field, we are still trying to build MEMEX as Bush envisioned it, or are we more influenced by a vision of information storage and presentation, of which Bush's paper was one of many?