- Jan 2019
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Is it not possible that some day the path may be established more directly?
The Wachowskis plagiarized.
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Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together.
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A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.
A desktop computer, but via a transparency projector...in any case, fun that Bush named his early PC "meme." I'm imagining his concept of a network to accomplish this would be something of a vacuum-tube system.
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The personnel officer of a factory drops a stack of a few thousand employee cards into a selecting machine, sets a code in accordance with an established convention, and produces in a short time a list of all employees who live in Trenton and know Spanish. Even such devices are much too slow when it comes, for example, to matching a set of fingerprints with one of five million on file.
Tonally, post-apocalyptic – there's a wonder at the future in this article, but also a strong current of fear. This very common, current technology reads like something straight out of 1984 – a book which would not be published for another 4 years.
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Combine these two elements, let the Vocoder run the stenotype, and the result is a machine which types when talked to.
Text to speech, in a nutshell.
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Two centuries ago Leibnitz invented a calculating machine which embodied most of the essential features of recent keyboard devices, but it could not then come into use. The economics of the situation were against it: the labor involved in constructing it, before the days of mass production, exceeded the labor to be saved by its use, since all it could accomplish could be duplicated by sufficient use of pencil and paper. Moreover, it would have been subject to frequent breakdown, so that it could not have been depended upon; for at that time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous.
Reminds me of the current struggle with things like quantum-computing and renewable energy. Their complexity and cost, in a capitalist economic system which values profit over all else, make it so that investing in technology which would improve over time or has the potential for greater uses down the line, just for the sake of improvement (or even for more pressing reasons) when their work can be replicated with existing technology no matter how laborious or harmful, is dis-incentivized.
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it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual.
Wikipedia anyone? Though, generally this seems like what would now be a reference to many institutions and libraries' efforts to digitize books, research, and culture – I doubt that Bush could have imagined (or wanted) the limitations on access to this information that broadly exist (or its use as a vector with which to make money).
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Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals
Seems a lot like internet messaging and texting – although I'd imagine here, Bush is talking about more basic telecommunications.
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