As We May Think
by Vannevar Bush · first published 1945
27% recommend73% neutral
Why HN recommends it
1945 essay that lays out the Memex, a personal associative information store, and anticipates hypertext, search, and the web. Suits anyone interested in the history of computing or in how information access might work.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
An essay by Vannevar Bush, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, and republished again as an abridged version in September 1945 — before and after the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan. Bush expresses his concern for the direction of scientific efforts towards destruction, rather than understanding, and explicates a desire for a sort of collective memory machine with his concept of the memex that would make knowledge more accessible, believing that it would help fix these problems. Through this machine, Bush hoped to transform an information explosion into a knowledge explosion. ([
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A list of notable magazine articles for techies would be remiss to omit Vannevar Bush's 1945 "As We May Think" for The Atlantic Monthly[1], also known as the "memex" essay. (The article is present in the extended list[2].) The Wikipedia entry[3] does a reasonable summary and exposition. This is a poignant and…
on “Kevin Kelly - The Best Magazine Articles Ever” ↗…years manually and had transferred textbooks to rolls of butcher paper that he kept in cabinets. He totally didn't understand the value of his process as something as transformative as Vannevar Bush's As We May Think. Instead he wanted to make it a proprietary format with proprietary content under a private publishing company for childhood education. He wanted a kludgy editor to make new content with and then a kludgy…
on “Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?” ↗Check out "As We May Think", a legendary essay by Dr. Vannevar Bush in 1945. Bush was the Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and "coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists…
on “Ask PG/HN: Recommended reading on the history of technology” ↗…Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System by Satoshi Nakamoto 5. Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson 6. Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System by Leslie Lamport 7. As We May Think by Vannevar Bush 8. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page
on “Ask HN: What are some interesting papers in CS for a beginner?” ↗Many people doing the coding haven't really thought that deeply about the systems. I'd like "web programming" to start with Vannevar Bush's As We May Think, then go to Licklider, Ted Nelson, then hypercard programming (hypertalk). Set up a BBS, a gopher site and then write HTML for NCSA Mosaic. Read the RFCs and W3C standards, learn about Netscape's SSJS…
on “In Defense of the Modern Web” ↗As We May Think, Vannevar Bush, July 1945. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think "As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush…
on “Ask HN: Reccomend essays to a young, inquiring mind” ↗The one that really blows my mind is Vannevar Bush -- July 1945 - "As we may think" - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m... If you can look past the way he describes technologies of the day, there's an amazing amount of foresight in how access to information,…
on “I’m a freelance copywriter” ↗It's worth reading Vannevar Bush on the value of associative trails: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think#Concept_realiz...
on “MSL: A New Programming Language for Text Editing and Fact Verification [pdf]” ↗…https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html Here's a comment I wrote about it elsewhere: https://lobste.rs/s/hba9nn/development_c_language_1993#c_hw6... One other essay that comes to mind is the 1945 piece by Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think", that lays out the vision for a "Memex", or memory extension device, in the direction of what PCs and smartphones eventually became. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m... I…
on “Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?” ↗…well worth watching (can be found on YouTube), and maybe reading some commentary on. Mind-blowing what his team put together that we still haven't really matched in some ways. - Vannevar Bush's piece "As We May Think" isn't really about computers, but it's hard not to connect it to them when you read it. And then maybe to sigh and wonder how someone who didn't have any machine like what he describes can have a vision…
on “Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?” ↗I guess if we all add our favourite papers, we’ll end up with a very long list indeed. My own additions: As we may think by Vannevar Bush, and then something on Project Xanadu. There doesn’t seem to be any foundational paper on the latter, but there is Ted Nelson’s book Literary Machines.
on “Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History” ↗1 point by NishanStepak 21 minutes ago | next | edit | delete [–] This goes well past libraries and into new concepts. Vannevar Bush wrote an article you might find interesting, As We May Think, it is the precursor in many ways to the internet. https://web.mit.edu/sts.035/www/PDFs/think.pdf A book you might also want to read is The World Brain by H.G. Wells which is about a world encyclopedia.…
on “Map of All Known Knowledge” ↗…Project by Max Ogden and others also connects with all this somewhat. There is this great book called "Design and Memory" from 1980 by Peter Huyck and Nellie Kremenak exploring such ideas. And of course "As We may Think" by Vannevar Bush. But the roots go further back though annotated scrolls (and the Talmud) and millennia of libraries -- and even back to the first "Standing Bear" cave paintings (see the book, "The Walking…
on “Email is your electronic memory” ↗…fact that you can't implement a certain system yet, having the conceptual ideas ready means that other people can be inspired by it when the technological requirements catch up. Read his seminal essay "As We May Think" here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m... __Douglas Engelbart__ If Vannevar Bush is considered the grandfather, then Douglas Engelbart is considered to be the father of…
on “Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?” ↗Someone did me the favor years ago of pestering me to read As We May Think. If you haven't, you should. It's interesting on its own, but particularly because it was published in the summer before WWII ended (when he was running what to me sounds like a precursor to DARPA).…
on “Vannevar Bush: A Public Sector Entrepreneur” ↗