Memex Reaction

http://www.gti.net/rveith/Memex_At_60.pdf

I read an article by Richard Veith about Memex and his view on it 61 years after the original article was written. He includes a great deal of background summarizing the contents of Bush's article and the scientific discoveries of the time. Veith then describes some aspects of the article that have been misunderstood. I found Veith to be inaccurate several times in this. He claims Bush did not envision handwriting recognition machines, while Bush very clearly imagines a feature of the Memex in which one may add hand written notes by scanning them into the Memex. If that is not a handwriting recognition machine then I don't know what is. He also claims the Memex did not include machine searching of the material itself, while Bush clearly envisions a device that can search material by keyword, even when not in use by its operator. Veith in his article right before these points charges that some cite the Memex article without seeming to have read its content, while I would have to charge the same to him.

My personal reaction to the Memex article is to be impressed, as in my opinion Bush hit perfectly on the main aspect of the internet. He saw a problem with the way information was stored. It was so cold and linear and provided no manner for linking information in a web, the way it is linked in reality. His linking of articles is an early reality of the internet and in a lot of ways the sole purpose of the early net. The ability to search millions and millions of texts and articles on Google would no doubt have impressed and satisfied Bush's main quandaries with information overload.