Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [17]
Bush wanted to free his fellow scientists from the drudgery of searching and cross-referencing their books, journals, and notes so that they could focus more on the creative side of their work.
“Creative thought and essentially repetitive thought are very different things,” said Bush. “For the latter there are, and may be, powerful mechanical aids.”
Bush did not want any scientist to worry about running out of space in his or her storage unit, which would imply having to discard items that might later prove useful. Memex was to have infinite storage. “If the user inserted five thousand pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so that he can be profligate and enter material freely,” he wrote.
Memex would allow the scientist to annotate any item in the collection by speech or writing. Bush also wanted to support the way our minds work in associating one idea with another. He contrasted existing data storage with biological memory:
When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and reenter on a new path.
The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
Bush hoped that “[selection] by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized.” To this end, he proposed that “trails” be created, connecting one document with the next in a sequence that could be followed again later. Trails could be given names, were something that you could share with your friends, and all the links were two-way. (The familiar hyperlinks on the World Wide Web are only partially realized trails. They are one-way, and are not grouped or named.)
Bush’s memex was inspirational. The time was ripe to realize his dream—and to extend it far beyond the realm of scientific research into the lives of everyone.
A REAL MEMEX
We named our research project MyLifeBits, and adopted memex as its minimal requirement. Our goals were twofold:
1. To create software for lifelogging, and the subsequent recall and usage of one’s e-memories. We wanted software to record a diverse array of information about one’s life and activities, from a variety of sources and devices, and to do so as easily, as unobtrusively, and as automatically as possible. The software would have to give people powerful tools for searching, organizing, annotating, and pattern-mining their ultimately huge e-memories.
2. To identify the benefits, drawbacks, technical issues, sticking points, and usability of Total Recall in real life. We wanted to try it out (as much as we could) and see what it was like.
Since 2001 I have been serving as the primary test subject, but Jim Gemmell is also an avowed user, while Roger and Vicki have tried out numerous aspects of it in real life. A number of universities also have used our software and have experimented with it.
MyLifeBits is not a commercial product; it is a research project. In fact, MyLifeBits software is not a single application. It is a prototypical suite of applications, and a storage system that blends files with a database. You won’t see Microsoft eventually ship MyLifeBits version 1.0. Instead, you will gradually see more and more of the kinds of things done in MyLifeBits also being done in operating systems