Back in 1945, a gentleman by the name of Vannevar Bush (an MIT faculty member and a science advisor to Franklin Roosevelt during World War II) pondered the nature of his research: he observed that he spent much of his time just looking up what other people were doing in his field before he even got to the point where he could start making meaningful contributions to the field. As a solution to this problem, Bush proposed a device which he called "memex" (for memory extender) that would be able to store the sum total of human knowledge, and if one had a question on any subject, one only needed to consult this device. Look at his description of the memex, and keep in mind that he came up with this idea in 1945, before computers with keyboards and display screens where even on anyone's drawing board:
"A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
"It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.
"In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely"
There's more to the description; in fact, he published his thoughts in an article in The Atlantic Monthly titled "As We May Think" in July, 1945. A very interesting read.
A footnote to all this is that Vannevar Bush is widely credited as being the conceptual inventor of the Internet--that's what the memex really is, after all. The irony is that when there was talk in the 2000 presidential election that Gore "invented" the Internet, Bush could very truthfully claimed that it was a Bush that really started it all. :)
- Hap Aziz