As We May Think (1945)

As We May Think (1945)
theatlantic.com

A radar operator named Doug Engelbart read this on the trip home from WWII. He realized that the computer was the tool that would make this possible. He went on and created everything from the mouse to lots of modern interactive computing. Many of you may have seen his "mother of all demos". If not, watch http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097...

That demo, in turn, influenced a generation of young computer scientists to invent interactive computing. Notably Ted Nelson & Andries van Dam who created hypertext and Alan Kay who, while at PARC, invented the desktop GUI and the concepts for tablet computer.

I recommend reading "What the Dormouse Said" by Markoff for a history of that era.

(I consider this the "NLS thread" of computer history. The other major interactive thread is from PLATO to Ray Ozzie/NOTES to Mitch Kapor, et al.)

However, we had really only discussed the concept of hypertext and how it fit with Bush's designs -- so much of the other concepts in the piece seem dependent upon technology which was still "far off" when I first read it in 1995. Digital photography was still a curiosity too expensive to be universally practical; I still spent lots of money getting film developed to have pictures that now sit unindexed in shoeboxes. E-ink wouldn't exist for several more years. Networked tablets were what Geordi LaForge carried around on Star Trek, not what you could buy for a few hundred bucks and use to read one of thousands of books while sitting at a bus stop. I would never expect that speech recognition would get "good enough" that I could have voice messages automatically transcribed and emailed to me.

It still blows my mind when Google Voice takes a voicemail and the transcript appears on an app on my smartphone. I still have that kid in a candy store feeling when reading a book on my iPad, or browsing all sorts of movies on Netflix's streaming service. This stuff is all amazing and I hope I never take it for granted.

We can point to other precursors, too. H. G. Wells, for example, wrote The World Brain before the War and tried hard to fund a foundation that would manage an open-source microfilm encyclopedia of the world’s knowledge. But the really astonishing prediction is not Bush’s but Murray Leinster’s 1946 short story, “A Logic Name Joe”…

http://www.markbernstein.org/Jul10/ALogicNamedJoe.html