interesting thing about bush was that his computing background was heavily analog, to the point that the digital switch eventually left him out of the action:
> Bush gradually drifted into the backwaters of science and technology. The rise of digital computing passed him by: an analog man to the end, he underrated the possibilities of digital technology. He did, however, make one contribution to the field. His “memex”—an idea for a machine that could store and connect information and thus work as an artificial aid to memory—later inspired others to create a version in digital form: hypertext. Wikipedia entries, with their hyperlinks taking readers ever deeper and wider, would likely have pleased Bush despite their digital form.
that's one thing that strikes me about the memex: it's very analog and, to me, that makes it seem like less of a direct line to the modern notions of hypertext, at least on first glance
> In September 1940, Norbert Wiener approached Bush with a proposal to build a digital computer. Bush declined to provide NDRC funding for it on the grounds that he did not believe that it could be completed before the end of the war. The supporters of digital computers were disappointed at the decision, which they attributed to a preference for outmoded analog technology. In June 1943, the Army provided $500,000 to build the computer, which became ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer. Having delayed its funding, Bush's prediction proved correct as ENIAC was not completed until December 1945, after the war had ended. His critics saw his attitude as a failure of vision.
At the point in my talk timestamped here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEKnA69M8eg&t=2279s , I make the case that a key part of his Memex vision - trails & trail-blazing as outlined in As We May Think, we haven't seen formally materialized yet...:
Closest I think we get is tweetorials, but would be closer if tweets had anchors to text in e-books & long-form documents, arriving upon which I could be presented with a selection of people in my social/academic network who had already taken off from that particular anchor point; and whose path ('trail' really is the ideal term) I could follow along onward to the next anchor point that they were inspired to find.
> Bush gradually drifted into the backwaters of science and technology. The rise of digital computing passed him by: an analog man to the end, he underrated the possibilities of digital technology. He did, however, make one contribution to the field. His “memex”—an idea for a machine that could store and connect information and thus work as an artificial aid to memory—later inspired others to create a version in digital form: hypertext. Wikipedia entries, with their hyperlinks taking readers ever deeper and wider, would likely have pleased Bush despite their digital form.
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/the-rise-and...
that's one thing that strikes me about the memex: it's very analog and, to me, that makes it seem like less of a direct line to the modern notions of hypertext, at least on first glance