Vannevar Bush

Vannevar Bush, c1944.

From "As We May Think", Life, 1945.

From "As We May Think", Life, 1945.

Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator. He was the initiator of the Manhattan Project, and is also known in engineering for his work on analog computers, for founding Raytheon, and for the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer with a structure analogous to that of the World Wide Web.

Bush on memex

• "Mechanization and the Record", Fortune, 1939. Contains the first published description of the memex. Later reworked into "As We May Think".

• "As We May Think", Atlantic Monthly 176:1, Jul 1945, pp 101-108; repr., abbr., Life 19:11, 10 Sep 1945, pp 112-124; repr. in Endless Horizons, Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1946, pp 16-38. [1], TXT. A copy of the article with Douglas Engelbart's notes in the margins, [2].
  • "As we may Think", trans. Regina Winter, comm. Hartmut Winkler, form diskurs 1:2, 1997, pp 136-147, HTML. Trans. of the parts 6-8. (English)/(German)
  • "Cómo podríamos pensar", trans. Ernesto Arbeloa, Revista de Occidente 239, Mar 2001, PDF. (Spanish)
  • "Tel que nous pourrions penser", trans. Ch. Monnatte, n.d. Trans. of an excerpt. (French)
  • "Como podemos pensar", trans. Marcelo Stoppa A. Corrêa, Furabolo.org, 2013. (Portuguese)
  • "Jak si lze myslet", trans. Dan Hrabina, in Vasulka Kitchen Cooking Reader #1: Beyond Media Texts: Primal & Final / Vašulkova kuchyňská kniha #1: texty k médiím: první & poslední, ed. Miloš Vojtěchovský, Brno: Vašulka Kitchen Brno, 2020, pp 177-193. (Czech)

• "Memex II", in From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, eds. James Nyce and Paul Kahn, London: Academic Press, 1991. Manuscript draft dated August 1957.

• "Memex Revisited", in Science Is Not Enough, New York: William Morrow, 1967, pp 75-101; repr. in From Memex to Hypertext: From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, eds. James Nyce and Paul Kahn, London: Academic Press, 1991, pp 197-216; repr. in New Media, Old Media, eds. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and ‎Thomas Keenan, Routledge, 2006, pp 85-95.

Collected writings

• Endless Horizons, Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1946. Collection of papers and addresses.
• Science Is Not Enough, New York: William Morrow, 1967, 192 pp.
• James Nyce, Paul Kahn (eds.), From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind's Machine, London: Academic Press, 1991.
  • Da Memex a hypertext: Vannevar Bush e la Macchina della Mente, Padova: Franco Muzzio, 1992, 270 pp. (Italian) [3]

On Bush and memex

• Jerome B. Wiesner, Vannevar Bush, 1890-1974: A Biographical Memoir, Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1979.
• G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century, MIT Press, 1999, 528 pp. [4]
• Richard Yeo, "Before Memex: Robert Hooke, John Locke, and Vannevar Bush on External Memory", Science in Context 20:1 (2007), pp 21-47.
• Belinda Barnet, "The Technical Evolution of Vannevar Bush’s Memex", Digital Humanities Quarterly 2:1 (2008).
• "Internet Pioneers: Vannevar Bush", undated.

See also

• Douglas Engelbart
• Ted Nelson

Links

• Memex animation, 1995.
• Video archive of 1995 MIT/Brown Symposium on the 50th Anniversary of As We May Think, [5], [6] [7]