A lever runs through it at will, stopping at inter-esting items, going off on side excursions. It is an inter-esting trail, pertinent to the discussion
This idea of going off on side excursions down side "trails" is a very non-linear concept, which is what Ted Nelson was so interested in when he was researching hypertext. Bush's descriptions remind me of stream of consciousness writing, which is also often non-linear in nature.
On the top are slanting translucentscreens, on which material can be projected for convenientreading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers.Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.
I think it's interesting that Bush associates the memex with something the size of a desk. This may be due to the fact that he naturally assumed that something this powerful and containing this much information would need to be housed in a large apparatus. This is obviously not the case in modern day as we see smart devices hundreds of times smaller than a desk with all of the capabilities that Bush lists.
This is a muchlarger matter than merely the extraction of data for thepurposes of scientific research; it involves the entire processby which man profits by his inheritance of acquired knowl-edge.
Bush's mission to create some sort of device that can make knowledge and information more accessible for any and all purposes (not just "scientific research") reminds me of our discussion during the first lecture about how Tim Berners-Lee initially invented the Internet for a small use case and did not have the vision that his creation could become this very thing that Bush is looking for. I wonder if anything would have changed if Berners-Lee had more of Bush's mindset.
Let us project this trendahead to a logical, if not inevitable, outcome.
Bush's matter-of-fact tone in this section stands out to me because of the confidence it exudes. He doesn't say "the camera hound of the future may wear...", he says they "will wear...". To make strong assertions about how one believes the future of our often wildly unpredictable universe will go, they must be quite self-assured.
Babbage, even with remarkably generous support for histime, could not produce his great arithmetical machine. Hisidea was sound enough, but construction and maintenancecosts were then too heavy. Had a Pharaoh been givendetailed and explicit designs of an automobile, and had heunderstood them completely, it would have taxed theresources of his kingdom to have fashioned the thousands ofparts for a single car, and that car would have broken downon the first trip to Giza
Bush gets at an interesting idea about what could differentiate a visionary/inventor from a "dreamer". In order to come up with a transformative yet still realistic invention, these thinkers must not only be able to envision future use cases for their invention, but also broad changes in societal production and innovation that would enable such an invention to become commonplace. If they do not have also have the corresponding vision of how society would have to change to accommodate their invention, the visionary ends up becoming more of a dreamer.