Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [16]
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.
Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct entry. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sorts of things. When one is in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be photographed. . . .
. . . As he ponders over his notes in the evening, he again talks his comments into the record. . . . He can add marginal notes and comments . . . and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus scheme. . . .
Another way to get material into the memex was with a wearable camera:
The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures. . . . The lens is of universal focus. . . . There is a built-in photocell on the walnut . . . which automatically adjusts exposure for a wide range of illumination. . . . It produces its result in full color. It may well be stereoscopic, and record with two spaced glass eyes. . . .
The cord which trips its shutter may reach down a man’s sleeve within easy reach of his fingers. A quick squeeze, and the picture is taken. On a pair of ordinary glasses is a square of fine lines near the top of one lens, where it is out of the way of ordinary vision. When an object appears in that square, it is lined up for its picture. As the scientist of the future moves about the laboratory or the field, every time he looks at something worthy of the record, he trips the shutter and in it goes, without even an audible click. . . .
I love Bush’s description of the memex. The image he conjures is like something straight out of a Jules Verne novel. I envision a luxurious mahogany desk festooned with brass push-buttons, levers, and translucent screens. I can just hear the muffled clickity clicking of mechanical registers crunching numbers deep inside the casing. But even though most of Bush’s hardware suggestions are now obsolete, the antiquated trappings belie the sheer brilliance of his prescience. Bush’s desk with storage, screens, keyboard, stylus, and platen is the equivalent of today’s desktop PC with a microphone, multiple monitors, and a scanner. Add in a tablet PC and you gain pen-based input. And sub-walnut-size cameras are now affordable and plentiful. Just about all new cell phones and laptops come with one built in, and they can also be bought and worn on their own.
Bush was writing with scientists in mind. “There is a growing mountain of research,” he lamented. “We are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember.”
But he also realized that quantity was not the core problem. “The difficulty,” he wrote, “seems to be not so much that we publish unduly . . . but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record . . . [It] must be continuously