"It...is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanised so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory."
Thus did Bush describe what he called a "memex," which he envisioned as a desk-size appliance festooned with "slanting translucent screens," buttons and levers, and loaded with microfilm. Data entry would be accomplished by means of "dry photography" on a transparent platen--a midcentury vision of the scanner.
Fifty-seven years later, Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell has realised Bush's memex, having entered "nearly everything possible from his entire life" into his computer as part of a Microsoft project at its Bay Area Research Center (BARC) in San Francisco.
Bell, who graduated from MIT with both a bachelor's and a master's degree, was from 1960 to 1983 vice president of research and development at Digital Equipment, where he was responsible for the VAX Computing Environment, among other products.
From 1966 to 1972 he was professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, and in 1995 began his tenure at Microsoft's newly established BARC.
The 68-year-old is the author of, among other books, "High Tech Ventures: The Guide to Entrepreneurial Success," in which he posits the Bell-Mason Diagnostic for analysing new businesses.
In 1999, he helped found the Computer History Museum at Moffett Field, in Mountain View, California, and he serves on the boards and technical advisory boards of Cradle Technology, Diamond Exchange, The Vanguard Group and the Bell-Mason Group.
Bell's awards include the IEEE Von Neumann Medal, the AEA Inventor Award, the 1991 National Medal of Technology and the 1995 MCI Communications Information Technology Leadership Award for Innovation. Bell spoke to News.com about his work on the Memex idea, which is variously called MyLifeBits and MyMainBrain.
Q: Whose idea was it to realize the Vannevar Bush vision?
A: It really evolved over time. I'd read the Bill Gates books, and Nathan (Myhrvold) had been a part of that, too, in terms of saying (regarding storage capacity), "at some point we'll be able to capture everything we have."
Jim Gray, who heads the lab at BARC, who's more of a server guy, he and I started looking at how big disks were going to affect what's going to happen to the capacity online. When you do this, then you come up with the question, what are we going to do with all the capacity?
Jim and I wrote an article on the 50-year outlook for computing, and that's when we realised that the amount of storage was so vast that we in principle could capture everything--everything you read, every picture you've ever taken, everything you've said.
We're past the point where your laptop can capture everything somebody's read. With digital photography coming in, it allows you to easily store all that stuff, and everything you've heard in terms of music.
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