MIT/Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium - Fifty Years After 'As We May Think’ (Part 1/5)

[MUSIC PLAYING]

PENFIELD: My name is Paul Penfield. I'm the MIT host of this symposium, and I'm pleased to welcome you all to MIT. I would say, first of all, I'd like to make sure that you all realize that the brains behind this whole outfit is this gentleman standing to your right here. That's Andy van Dam. And you'll have plenty of chance to hear him and see him in action, because he's going to be the MC for the whole affair.

And I want to make sure that you realize that if there is any success associated with this symposium, it's all due to him. And if there are any failures, it's probably because the local arrangements have not been done well, and that was my province.

OK, I will alert you to the fact the restrooms are located by the door where you came in. And just in case you didn't notice it-- this is always a question that people ask here-- I'd also like to tell you that the coffee breaks and the lunch are both held upstairs. And if you go back through the corridor that you used to get to this room, you will find a set of stairways which will lead you upstairs to where the coffee will be served during the coffee break, and the lunch will be served at noontime.

The reception this afternoon is in the lobby of a very appropriate building. It's the Bush Building at MIT. You will get directions on how to get there at the time, and there's also a little map in your packet that shows how to get there. And there will be a whole group of people that will go over en masse to there.

Now, at the banquet, the banquet will be held at the Hyatt, which is a hotel, which is down thataway. And you can also follow the whole group from the reception to get there. I don't think you'll have any problem. And it's all within walking distance.

Let me mention that this event is being transmitted three different ways, for those of you who are interested. The local audience probably is not, but those of you who are listening to my voice out there somewhere, out in Never Never Land, I'd mentioned that this is being broadcast on the MIT cable channel 9. It is also being broadcast by the multicast backbone system of the internet called Mbone. And Mbone is very good in supplying good audio and maybe some video.

In addition, the slides, as used by the various speakers, are available in real time on the worldwide web. And those of you who are listening right now can turn on a web browser and access the following URL. The URL is known as http://www-evat/bush/.

And somewhere I should have a foil which shows that, but unfortunately, the foil master disappeared on us. Oh, well let's get it up. Where's the foil itself? It's the third foil.

OK, those of you in TV land can now copy that down, and this should also be the foil which is shown on the worldwide web. Without saying anything more about this, I'd like to turn the proceedings over to Andy van Dam, who will give a little introduction, including something about the life of Bush himself, and will then introduce another speaker, Paul Kuhn. Andy?

DAM: Thanks very much, Paul. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this wonderful celebration. I would like to start off by thanking the folks who made all this happen. And first and foremost, Lisa Manikowski, from Brown University and the Center for Graphics and Scientific Visualization. She has been this symposium. Can we have lights on her for a moment please?

She has eaten, drinken, and slept this symposium for the last few months, and she will also be behind the registration desk, and any logistics questions you may ask her about. Second of all, the gentleman who looks like you do not want to mess with him, over there, is Dr. Robert McDermott from Utah, AV specialist extraordinaire, as well as a computer graphics researcher. And he is our producer, and you do what he says. This is especially true for us speakers.

He and his sidekick, Jim Rose from Utah, have been working on this for a very long time, and mostly with their colleagues from the local institution, Larry Gallagher. Can we see you, Larry, or is he in the back room? I assume most of these people are hard at work making the conference happen. So we'll just give him a round after I finish.

Scott Dynes, who was pressed into service relatively recently to learn all about Mbone, and is now a certified Mbone guru. And Ed Moriarty, who has been doing yeoman's service on all aspects of systems, computers, and AV, local folks who've done a heroic service. Let's have a hand for them.

David Clobhock Brown has been helping out with producing all aspects of the symposium slides, various details of AV, and organizing a group of student and staff volunteers from both Brown and MIT. Thank you very much, folks.

Second category of people without whom we wouldn't be here are the sponsors who have contributed money to make this happen. National Science Foundation, Apple, Microsoft, the center, the individual home institutions, and two companies who kindly lent us the gear that we will be using today. Thanks.

Now, what I'd like to do to set the stage a little bit is to tell you how this celebration came about. And I want to give all appropriate credit to the folks who actually had the idea-- to wit, Greg Lloyd, Steve DeRose, and Chris Newsom, former students of mine well indoctrinated in hypertext and hypermedia systems, in the case of Greg, going back to the '60s.

And these folks are now employees of electronic book technologies. They formed a reading club, and read all through the literature and came to my office one Saturday and said, look, do you realize it's 50 years ago that As We May Think came out. We should do something. We cannot leave this the occasion go unmarked. And I said, you're right. That's a very good idea.

So then they said, all right, fine. Why don't you execute this wonderful idea? And so they can get the credit for having had it, and the rest of us were left to implement. Now, my concept of what we ought to do to mark this is not to have a media circus, but instead to have a small research symposium which, in German academic life last century, was called a fest shrift, fest in the sense of festivity, and shrift in the sense of something written down. Well, different media today, but you get the idea.

Essentially, you honor an outstanding researcher by having a research symposium in his or her honor, populated by the best folks in that field and a lot of former students, typically. So my concept for this was, let's put on the only thing we can do, a posthumous fest shrift, and honor him by having pioneering researchers speak many of whom have been influenced by, as we may think. We found great enthusiasm on the part of Dr. Paul Penfield, and he threw himself into this project with heart and soul and many late night hours, particularly to work up this companion piece of software that he modestly told us about in just a moment.

I'm proud to say that all of the speakers I invited accepted. I think that's a pretty good testament to the magic of the Bush name and the contribution. Now this event-- I want to give you some caveats about what this event is and is not. It is specifically focused on highlighting as we may think. Not the many other hugely important aspects of Bush's amazing career and his great impact on our society. To do justice to Bush, the man and all his contributions, would require a set of specialized symposia, some technical, some social political and economic and philosophical, and that work remains to be done by another group.

Now this symposium, even in its narrow focus, is in no way meant to be either comprehensive or representative. There isn't time or room. I picked a handful of true computer pioneers who have helped to define our field, and they will speak to various aspects of the, as we may think, memex vocoder vision. And I preferred longer, more thoughtful, in-depth talks to a larger number of shorter talks. Matter of taste.

What I want to do now, having told you a little bit about the genesis of this, is to do a very cursory job reintroducing you to Bush the man and his manifold contributions. What I'd like to do before the chronology is to roll a couple of minutes of videotape, which Paul has lent us. Can I black that, Robert? Thank you.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- Dr. Vannevar Bush is one of America's more important citizens. Now in his 66th year, this son of a universalist minister has served the government for various periods over a period of about 40 years. And the last four presidents have called him Van.

Dr. Bush has been called the dean of American Scientists, one of the great mathematicians, electrical engineers, and research administrators of our time. During World War II, he was the guiding spirit and the driving force of America's achievements in the physical and medical sciences. He was the research boss of the atomic scientists, the first civilian scientist to sit with our highest war council.

Dr. Bush served many years as vice president of MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And recently, he retired as president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Today, Dr. And Mrs. Bush live in this brand new house that they recently finished building. It's on a wooded hilltop, a half hour drive west of Boston in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Good evening Dr. Bush.

- Why, good evening, Ed.

- How are you tonight?

- Very well indeed, thank you.

- Well, sir, I've known you a number of years, and last week I managed to mispronounce Vannevar, and I apologize.

- Well, you've got plenty of company there, Ed. Most everyone mispronounces it. I think the record is held by one postmaster who managed to pronounce it four different ways in the course of one evening.

- Dr. Bush, you built electric brains and atomic bombs. How does that compare with the experience of building a new house?

- Well, building a house is a much more pleasant experience.

[END PLAYBACK]

DAM: So now you know that we've all been mispronouncing it all these years. I'm told it's originally a Dutch name, but being Dutch, I don't necessarily buy that. OK, slide again, please. There is no way to do justice in just a few slides to this truly remarkable career. So I just took a few of the highlights. I may have missed some other highlights.

You'll notice his life in academe was all in the Northeast. He spent a huge part of it at MIT and started working in the '20s already on what we now think of as an analog computer, the differential analyzer, many, many versions of it, including into World War II, the Rockefeller differential analyzer, which was partially electronic and partially mechanical, and was a huge room full of numerical calculation equipment.

He was appointed vice president of MIT and the first dean of the School of Engineering, as Paul Penfield reminded me, patented the differential analyzer, and then started working on the device that concerns us most here today, the microfilm based rapid selector, which was an information storage, and especially retrieval mechanism. He then went to Washington.

He had many positions in Washington, and was probably the most, single most influential scientist and engineer during the war years, throwing himself into the war effort on a number of fronts. What is particularly important to us is this appointment to the office of scientific research and development, and the fact that he was President Roosevelt's science advisor. And these various appointments made him a central figure in the development of nuclear fission, and indeed, he was the one who kicked off the Manhattan Project.

In '45, as we know, As We May Think appeared. It was based on more than a decade of cogitation in this area. So he was basically summarizing what he had been thinking and working on for a very long time. Then, very important to our profession as a whole, indeed, to science as a whole, President Roosevelt asked Dr. Bush to think about what we could learn from World War II and to see how we could apply the enormous progress in science and engineering to the civilian sector, not just to war.

He wrote Science, the Endless Frontier, which led effectively via one of its recommendations to the formation of the Science Foundation. This is what the report looks like. We have a copy of it here if any of you would like to browse. And this is one of the wonderful quotes from there, still as relevant today as when he wrote it.

"The pioneer spirit is still vigorous within this nation. Science offers a largely unexplored hinterland for the pioneer who has the tools to--" I can't quite read it from here. "--for this task. The rewards of such exploration, both for the nation and the individual, are great. Scientific progress is one essential key in our security as a nation to our better health, to more jobs, to a better standard of living, and to our cultural progress."

Powerful words. He was appointed chairman of yet another national military establishment board. And it's important to remember that he was a civilian, and it was most unusual for a civilian to hold all these high positions influencing the course of the military directly. Another offshoot of his interest in microfilm and recording and distributing things photographically is that he founded and became chairman of the Graphics Arts Research, which developed the photon photo typesetter.

Then he became a member of the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee, chairman of the MIT Corporation, and honorary chairman of the MIT Corporation for many years. Here are some of his selected publications. And it's interesting to note how widely he wrote. He didn't just write about science or science policy. He also wrote about multiple other things, somewhat related, in books like this, a collection of essays, where, for example, he has multiple chapters devoted to his musings on the art and science of management.

"All my life, which has now lasted something under 100 years, I've observed managers in action: in government and universities and in industry, and I have puzzled over what made them tick. I'm far from the end of the puzzle, for no man can ever fully understand another, even a close friend. But can we probe a bit toward the essence of the good, the great, managers' success? The world is so short on good managers that it is certainly worth a try." And then he has many interesting observations about what makes for a good manager.

The list of honors is phenomenal, and we decided to stick to just one page. Here they are. I'm not going to read them to you. You notice that they include both the order of the British Empire and presidential medals presented by presidents. I can't think of anyone more honored for a multitude of activities, engineering, science, and policy making, than Vannevar Bush. And another partial reflection of how he was appreciated-- a list of his honorary degrees.

The thing that I want to do next, having said just the briefest outline of his life and times, is to give my own spin on memex and Bush's thinking in context. So I'm gonna talk for a few minutes about historical antecedents.

Although we might like to think that we're only now entering, or well into the information age, the acquisition and management of information has, of course, been central to human society since prehistoric times. Language is an invention. It is a technology for organizing and transmitting information. Writing, in particular, transformed the ability of societies to record and transmit culture and information.

More specifically, the phonetic alphabet was an immense improvement on its syllabic and ideographic predecessors. Other major achievements, which we tend to take for granted, but we shouldn't, because they are so hugely important in our successful ability to deal with information, the invention of the page, of punctuation, of spacing between words, of capitalization, tables of content, indices, alphabetic sorting, and so on. These were inventions, and they took time to take root and they've made a qualitative and quantitative difference in our productivity.

Now, hypertext, as a very particular style of writing, non-sequential writing as Ted defined it, deals with things like marginalia and cross references, and see also's. Now, textual techniques make an appearance very early on in the history of writing, and have evolved to be a major feature of our literacy in the largest sense. I just want to illustrate with a couple of things that I find fascinating.

This is a 16th century King James epistle of Apostle Paul to the Romans. And you will see that there is not just the main text, but little superscripts and lots of marginalia, which itself has additional cross references. And this helped you understand the Bible, the writings in their cultural, historical, and religious contests.

Now, this 16th century manuscript hardly started this technology, and it wasn't obvious to the average reader on exactly how it was to be used as a tool. So the printer felt it necessary to instruct the reader on how to deal with this, and wrote what I consider to be one of the first user's manuals.

It says, "Diligent Reader, Dear Christian Reader, to the intent thou mightest better enjoy the benefit of these--" I can't read it from here. I apologize. "These notes are expositions upon the New Testament. I thought it not amiss to declare unto thee the rules of the same." In other words, he lays out the typographic conventions and exactly how you are to wend your way through this.

Because not everybody who picked up this manuscript was familiar with other things like it, like the Talmud, which for many centuries had made it a point of having annotation be the point of the discourse. So the center is the primary text, and then we have generations of commentary, and commentary upon commentary, with all their cross references scattered typographically about the page. And that, too, is a convention that has to be learned.

Well, the Talmud didn't invent marginalia, either. We can go much further back. This manuscript from poems by Bacchylides, I'm mispronouncing, no doubt, is a papyrus scroll that dates roughly from 3, the third century A.D., but the poet actually wrote it 3 centuries B.D. And fortunately, the written version of this, which we cannot tell how faithful it was to the original, was found, along with other scrolls, in the sands of the Egyptian desert and were preserved for our edification and pleasure.

So here's an example of that. You will notice in the second column-- I forgot to bring the laser pointer-- but you can see in the second column there are two kinds of things sticking off slightly to the left, a marginal note, and then there is some kind of little glyph at the bottom that is probably some kind of coded reference.

So thank you. The man who is never unprepared. Right there, and right there. Thanks.

Well, not surprisingly, inventors, at least as far back as the Renaissance, imagined mechanical devices to support hypertextual readings. I want to show you one absolutely stunning wood cut from an engineer from the 16th century, Ramelli, who invented, effectively, a rotating bookcase in which you could have pages opened and cross references to other pages. And then just by turning a wheel, which was a carved, levered piece of machinery, get yourself to the appropriate place.

This was imitated by Chinese, and I have a lovely drawing of a Chinese temple that I can show you later which shows one of these machines in it in symbolic form. And then we actually have some ruins that people photographed from a temple from I think 6th century A.D., where a device like this was apparently built. So mechanical aids have been around for a long time.

More recently, researchers such as Michael Buckland, who studied the history of information technology, and W. Boyd Raymond, have been recovering for our attention neglected 19th and 20th century thinkers. Two I'll mention today-- Paul Otlet, a Belgian who lived from 1868 to 1944, and Emmanuel Goldberg, a Russian from 1881 to 1970, both of whom created information management systems in the early 20th century.

Otlet, for instance, implemented a hypertext like system with analog means, and imagined multimedia document management systems that would work with linked microfilm and telecommunications based on a variant of the Dewy Decimal called the universal decimal classification. And probably the first book on information science was [FRENCH], written in 1934.

Goldberg, who became the first managing director of Zeiss Ikon in Germany, demonstrated and later patented a prototype of a microfilm selector, much like memex, using a photoelectric cell, the first functioning electronic document retrieval system in 1932. His patent was, in fact, prior art for Bush's attempt to patent the rapid selector. He was unfortunately driven out by the Nazis, first went to Paris, then to Israel, where he died.

These ingenious systems were in some respects similar to Bush's, in some respects different. I really hope you will get a chance to look at the work of these earlier thinkers and thank folks who brought these citations to my attention. They're absolutely fascinating. But our perspective today is not with Bush's predecessors, but with Bush and his followers. And for introducing you to that theme of our conference, I'd like introduce you to my friend and colleague, Paul Kahn, who is going to tell us a little bit about Bush and the memex.

Paul is one of the two official, in quotes, "memex historians," by virtue of having written the book that you all know about, memex to hypertext in Academic Press 1991, From Memex to Hypertext by Nyce and Kahn. He got a BS in English from Kenyon. He was a director at the Institute for Research and Information Science at Brown University that I helped start in the early '80s. And after Iris folded, he became president of dynamic diagrams, where he still is.

Under his direction this summer, Ian Edelman did a memex visualization using Macromedia Director, and that is one of the things that Paul will show us. Paul, would you come on stage, please?

KAHN: Can I get the slides? What I'm going to do is go over some visual material. Andy has shown you a timeline with some of the names and some of the dates. I'm going to show you some pictures that correspond to a number of the machines that he's already discussed.

This is Vannevar Bush, 1912. He's a graduate student at Tufts University in Medford Massachusetts. And this is his first invention. This machine was called the profile tracer. It was a machine for doing surveying of land. Next slide, please.

Oh, I got a-- I make the next slide. Sorry. This machine would actually draw out the profile of the land that you ran it across. And the reason that it did that was a mechanism that involved a wheel integrator that would actually plot on paper. And it was this basic technique or technology that became the starting point for many of the analog computers that Bush then later developed at MIT with his graduate students.

The first really successful one was called the product intergraph. This is from 1925, and was developed at MIT between '25 and '28. This machine, which was both electrical and mechanical-- there's an electric motor by his hand there-- was capable of solving second order differential equations, and was awarded a number of engineering prizes. The mechanism behind this-- and it could get quite large when you wanted to solve fairly large second order differential equations. That's Van in the front of the line there.

The mechanism behind this became the basis for what was then developed around 1928 through the mid '30s, the differential analyzer, which was a little bit larger. And the differential analyzer was capable of running very complex differential equations. And people literally came from all over the world to MIT to solve their differential equations on this machine. And there were a number of machines built in Europe imitating this machine.

To solve an equation, you actually had to set up all of the wheels and the rods to model the equation, and then you ran it. And it would solve the equation by plotting it out in curves on these readouts. This is Sam Caldwell in the foreground and Van Bush behind him, looking at a family of curves. This photo is from around 1932.

So this technology was very promising and won many awards and funding from a number of agencies. And this was really the main line of research that Bush was known for before he went to Washington and became a major public figure. The line of research here at MIT culminated in the largest of these machines, the Rockefeller differential analyzer. That's what you see in this photograph.

And just to get a sense of scope here, this machine weighed about 100 tons, had 2000 vacuum tubes, a few thousand relays, and 150 motors. This machine was built in '42 and was used for calculating ballistics tables during the war. It was made public in '45, and by the time it was shut down in 1950, it was the last of the analog machines. It was quite clear by the late '40s that this was just not a particularly fruitful line of research once digital computers began to be developed in the mid and late '40s.

But what really concerns us is another line of research that was going on in parallel with this. Around 1937, here at MIT in one of the labs, Bush was supervising a project for building a microfilm rapid selector. And unfortunately, there are no photographs or actual drawings of this machine. But this schematic, which was put together by Tom Bag at one of the National Research institutes, is the best thing we've got.

And what's going on here is that you had a roll of 35 millimeter film-- figure out what to press. Here we go. There was a roll of 35 millimeter film, and that film on each frame of the standard movie film had basically a double frame. One frame was a piece of microfilm with a picture of a page, and the rest of that film was a mask of dots. That film could be run fairly rapidly through a transport mechanism. There were about 120,000 frames on the roll and you could run that roll through the machine in about two minutes.

There was a set of photo relays over here that was running light through the mask, and the strobe, which had been developed by Dr. Edgerton here at MIT was being used to fire off a second recording camera when the mask actually matched the dot pattern on the film. And so it would rerecord individual frames on a second roll of film. You could develop a mask that matched the particular piece of information you wanted to retrieve off the film, it would run through the entire film, rerecord only those frames that contained the information you were looking for, and then you had a second microfilm that contained those select pages.

This is the technology that was being developed in Bush's lab. And this, as far as we can tell, is the technology that was behind the article that he was writing at the time, the first manuscript that we found here at the MIT archives. Jim Nyce and I, when we were working on this, of what became, as we may think, was entitled Mechanization in the Record. And it dates from around 1938 before Bush left MIT and went to Washington.

This idea of having microfilm rapid selectors continued to be developed in the '50s and the '60s. This is a microfilm rapid selector film from one that was done at the ERA in Washington. And this was done under CIA sponsorship at Yale University in the 1960s. As you see, the dot patterns got more complex. The problem with these machines was that they didn't work.

They were really a very nice idea, but the technology couldn't move the film fast enough or record the position of things accurately enough to be practical. But they kept building them for about 20 years. And they kept getting larger. This is actually a picture of the rapid selector from Yale University, one of the last ones built around 1962.

Bush was also working on a few other things that he patented. One of them is the justifying typewriter. I don't know how many people realized that he held the patent on that one. And the justifying typewriter, which is what he and Sam Caldwell are standing in front of over here, also became part of the mechanism for the early photon phototype setter. It was basically hooking up electronic relays and photographing things on film that was behind the photo typesetter, as well.

Now, the article, which finally appeared in '45, just days after the atomic bombing in Japan, attracted a lot of people's attention. And it was then reprinted in Life Magazine, which is the article that you've got in your packet here. The illustrations appeared in the Time reprint, the one that you've got.

And these illustrations were done by a technical illustrator by the name of Alfred Krimi, who had been working at Sperry Rand in New York and was called by the editors at Life and asked if he would please illustrate this article. Because when it originally appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, of course there were no pictures. And Life Magazine really liked to have pictures.

So what Krimi did was he read the article, and that's really only had to go on, and he came up with these drawings such as this one, which is the memex. And his notion of what it looked like was based on the text as well as the fact that he'd been doing a lot of technical illustrating on different types of machines that Sperry had been building. And he sent the illustrations to Bush for approval, and Bush said, yep, that's OK. There was really no more detail to it than that.

Now, Andy ran one videotape-- there are two interviews that are in the MIT archives, the one with Edward R. Murrow. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to run a little tiny piece of another one. Both of them are from the '60s. This one is from 1964 from the MIT science reporter. You'll see John Fitch, my IT science reporter, at the beginning, and then a little bit of Bush.

This is the only place where we've found in the record that Bush publicly talks about anything that you might imagine was related to memex, other than the printed articles. No one ever asked him about this. No one ever interviewed him, and certainly, in any of the TV interviews that were done later. Everyone was very concerned about what he thought of the atomic bomb, but what he thought about memex was never brought up.

But this at least comes close. If you could roll the videotape, please?

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- I think one position that I talked to marveled at it more because it was as though when it had finally unlocked the real secret that gotten down to the basic essentials.

- But all the way through biology, there are all sorts of things going on. We're getting a whole new understanding of physiology. [INAUDIBLE] work that's being done on the way in which the nerves operate. It's fascinating. And the relations, the resemblances, between the brain's operations and the operations of a modern analytical machine is a fascinating aspect of it.

- Speaking of analytical machines, this is something that you pioneered in. What do you think about the present day computer and perhaps its role in our future?

- Well you said it a minute ago that there was so much happening in the world that it probably would be impossible to understand it or keep up with it. Well, that would be true if it wasn't for the fact that we have far better means of understanding than we used to have, far better media or communication, far better ways of presenting things, including the little job that you and I are doing, I hope. And that's helping a great deal.

But as time goes on, the analytical machine which will supplement a man's thinking methods, which will think for it, will have as great an effect on his grasp of the world and his access to data and so on as manipulation of it. Well, that was great an effect in that way as the invention of the machine way back, took the load off of men by giving them mechanical power instead of the power of their muscles.

- You see no dangers in the increasing reliance on the machine to think for us?

- No, I don't see any. Once in a while, somebody that likes to write for spectacular purposes will talk about a race of self-reproducing machines that will take over civilization, banish humanity, like the old Frankenstein story. Well, we still believe in fairy tales. But they're amusing but that's all.

[END PLAYBACK]

KAHN: Thank you, Van. What I'm going to do to finish up is I'm going to run an animation that we created this summer. My colleague, Jim Nyce, who unfortunately can't be here today, who worked on the book with me, makes the very succinct point that the memex, while it was never built, was a form of speculative and imaginative engineering, which clearly has inspired many of us. And with that in mind, we did a little speculative and imaginative animation to run.

This was created largely by Ian Edelman, who at the time, was a student industrial design at Rhode Island School of Design, and now is employed by Microsoft Corporation out in Redmond.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- And the relations, the resemblances, between the brain's operations and the operations of a modern analytical machine is a fascinating aspect of it.

[END PLAYBACK]

KAHN: This was our model of the memex, and this animation allows you to either listen to a recreation of the scenario from the article, or simply go in and point and explore the animation. We'll run through this little condensed section of the Turkish boat scenario, which is found at the end of the article first.

I think we lost the audio.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, and leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items.

Occasionally, he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. His trails do not fade. Several years later, his talk with a friend turns to the Turkish bow. In fact, he has a trail on it. It is an interesting trail, pertinent to the discussion. So he sets a reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it to his friend for insertion in his own memex.

[END PLAYBACK]

KAHN: So at the end of the trail, we would end up with a spool of microfilm that would be mailed or otherwise couriered to your colleague. The animation allows you to point at particular parts of the machine, such as the keyboard. And if you'd like to go back and kind of run over that demo--

What we had in mind here was the sort of keyboard on the mechanical calculators at the time. Likewise, if you wanted to review just how he also invented pen computing, you could take a look at that. What he had in mind as to how you could write on this film and somehow record it back on the microfilm is kept particularly vague in the article. Likewise, if you'd like to go in and take a look at the mechanism, as Alfred Krimi did, we did render somehow the sort of microfilm transports and projectors that might make this work. But as far as a demo goes--

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[CHILDREN LAUGHING]

[END PLAYBACK]

KAHN: I think the closer you get to this mechanism, the less likely it is that it would ever work. This animation, as well as that small quick time video of Bush, is available on our website. That's www.dynamicdiagrams.com. And we'll do what we can over the next day or so to put it on the same website as the rest of the material here.

And again, I'd like to thank Ian Edelman for doing this work, and thank you very much Andy van Dam for giving us the opportunity to show this off. If people are interested in having copies of this, please speak to me later and we'll figure out a way of getting copies to everybody. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

DAM: We're running a little bit behind schedule, but this is supposed to be an informal research symposium. So let's have a couple of questions from the audience if anyone wants to follow up any of these trails that Paul established for us.

KAHN: Mr. Lusk.

AUDIENCE: In fairness to Bush, he did write another article in '67, Memex Revisited--

DAM: Excuse me. I forgot to mention, in order for the folks out there in radio land to hear us, would you please use this mic and identify yourself? It's a bit of a pain, but it'll be better.

AUDIENCE: Just to say, in fairness to Bush, he did write another article about memex in '67, and he did give up on the microfilm stuff in favor of digital technology. He did figure out that that was the way to go.

KAHN: I entirely agree. He did write that article. In fact, he wrote several articles. That's the only one that was published. And I didn't mean to suggest that he didn't want to talk about memex. What I'm suggesting to you is that when people would interview him and when he was noted as a famous person, no one seemed to be interested in this particular part of his invention after the initial interest in this in '45, which seems incredible to us now, since that's all that we remember. But people in the '60s remembered him or were very interested in him for quite different things. Any other questions? Thank you very much.

DAM: Well, I'd like to indulge myself just before introducing our first speaker by telling you my particular trail to Bush. I started looking at the problems of large scale electronic documentation for the Navy in 1960 in my first year in graduate school. I did my master's thesis on a blue print repository using microfilm technology. In fact, we had millions and millions of aperture cards, which were IBM cards with 35 millimeter microfilm inside. And you could work on the computerized part as if it were just a vanilla IBM card, and then still have the benefit of large scale information storage on the image.

In fact, in 1965, I wrote a paper, my first real paper, on a technical information retrieval system that combined not just microfilm, but nanofiche. Now, I just want to show this little cultural artifact to you. Anybody know what this is, this little tiny square?

I'll give you a clue. It was handed out at the 1964 World's Fair in the NCR Pavilion. Anybody old enough to remember that? This is nanofiche. It's NCR's photochromic micro image technology. It was a grainless organic dye. And this is 1,280 pages of the King James version of the Bible, absolutely crystal clear under the right kinds of optics. This had huge information density. So in my system, I thought we should combine the best features of information densities for storage purposes and Boolean retrievals, based in my case on an associative memory simulation called multi-list, that had been done by faculty members at Brown University.

In 1967, I met Ted Nelson, an old college friend, at a computer conference. And he persuaded me to think of our brand new lBM 2250 display as more than just a graphics tube, seduced me into thinking about hypertext instead of all those nice line drawings, introduced me to Bush. From that came our joint effort on the hypertext editing system in '67 and '68. I learned about NLS, the online system and Doug Engelbert in '68, and went on to build a multiple number of other hypermedia and electronic book systems, and helped found IRIS and electronic book technologies. I've also been assigning this wonderful article to almost three decades worth of generations of students.

With that introduction, let me get to what I think is really an important part of the program, not merely the first speaker, but a very special speaker. I think of Doug Englebart as the ur-pioneer, not merely a pioneer. He started at Stanford Research Institute. His work enormously influenced researchers at--

As you notice, when he says to jump, I ask how high.

OK, start the introduction. I thought I was, Robert. Ready? Thank you. So Doug did his work with his colleagues on the online system at SRI. But their work enormously influenced what happened in the early '80s at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. And that, as we know, led to things like Lisa and Mac at Apple, which in turn led to Windows at Microsoft, and so on. So there is an enormously visible trail from Doug to our industry as it exists today. And I hold him and his group personally responsible, in the good sense, I want you to know, for building augmentation systems.

But he also thought about how tool building should help the end user. He thought about the process of introducing new tools and how processes must change in the organization, how the organization itself had to evolve to make use of the tool, got us familiar with the term bootstrapping, bootstrap institute, bootstrapping yourself and your organization.

He and his people put on what is still today, in my mind and other people who remember it, the mother of all demos. It is still unsurpassed. It happened at the fall joint computer conference. It was beyond bleeding edge, and it came off beautifully. We're going to be privileged to see a little footage from that in a moment.

And finally, very personally, after I learned about him I was privileged to spend a couple of days in his lab stealing his best ideas and implementing many of them in our next hypertext system called Fress in the late '60s. Doug, it's a thrill for me to welcome you here.

ENGLEBART: Well, thank you very much. This is a real treat. And it left me a little bit awash in trying to tell what I'd like to tell as something that fits into the Bush picture. And I think the best thing I can do is go sit down and start giving a presentation. One thing though, I can tell you, is my first introduction to the Bush thing happened just slightly less than 50 years ago, maybe three or four weeks less than that, that there was a young sailor boy that was plunked down on an island in the Philippines to await assignment to some local area of work.

He was an electronic technician. He had been through years of electronic technician training and shipped out. And very interestingly, that just as his ship was backing out and steaming around the San Francisco Bay to go out, there were many, many whistles and toots and everything else, and we thought, gee, do they celebrate everybody leaving that way?

It turned out was V-J day. And so 68 days later, at eight knots, we got out to the Philippines, et cetera. But in waiting around for a week or something like that in that camp right part of the jungle, I wandered around one day and I found this Philippine hut. They really are up on stilts, and animals live underneath. And it was all nice and clean. And it said Red Cross Library.

So I climbed a little ladder, and it was a very pleasant room in there, about 20 feet on a side. It actually was a very nicely outfitted little library. And with the thousands of Marines and sailors around like that, there wasn't a single other person in it. So I spent many hours in there. So I found that Life Magazine article on Bush, and I always remember it was very exciting to see that. And I'd have enough technical training by then to look at it and think about it, et cetera.

So it didn't become an impact thing that drove me the rest of the time. What I'd like to do is go sit down here now and tell you the stories of what, to me, the potential is, and I would very, very much like to have been able to work with Bush and talk to him. And I tried once sending him a letter and sort of an outline draft I'd made, and I didn't hear back from him. This was in 1962.

And somebody had told me that he was already so old, and he really was in a rest home or something, and probably wasn't returning. Well, turns out he lived another 12 years and published books, et cetera. But I wasn't aware of that then.

One of the things that you have to realize is living way out there in the Palo Alto area, that you tend to feel that MIT was the center of the universe then. And then just to prove it, that I'd worked for years by 1962, '63. Really, my push started in 1951 about committing a career to trying to do the most to help humans cope better with complexity and urgency. And computers and interactive use was the idea that came to my mind.