At the Dawn of the Atomic Age, a Technocrat Ahead of His Time

Fifty years ago this month--the same month the atomic bomb was successfully tested and readied for use against Japan--the man who oversaw the Manhattan Project published an article in the Atlantic Monthly about the greatest challenge facing science and technology in the coming postwar era.

That challenge had absolutely nothing to do with the mysteries of the atom, but practically everything to do with the future of software. As the war was drawing down, Vannevar Bush, the crusty electrical engineer who ran America’s Office of Scientific Research and Development, identified the multimedia management of knowledge as the next essential task for science and scientists.

The technocrat who supervised every military innovation from Fat Man and Little Boy to radar to proximity fuses to the ENIAC digital computer argued that crafting new tools for thought--not harnessing menageries of subatomic particles--should be the focus of scientific ingenuity and creativity in the postwar era. That’s why he called his article “As We May Think.” This was a bold, radical and provocative pronouncement from someone who was directly responsible for ushering in the Atomic Age.

In fact, “As We May Think” proved the sort of popular manifesto that radically transforms how people think. Life magazine took the unprecedented step of reprinting Bush’s article, dramatically expanding its reach. The article both inspired and defined the design discussions of what personal technologies could be and should be. Its influence on the culture of computerdom is difficult to overstate.

Bush clearly articulated the importance of creating webs, links and trails between the islands of multimedia information. America’s top engineer didn’t envision a mere “computer” crunching numbers and processing words; he imagined a personal media navigator that augmented and amplified how people think. Bush wasn’t merely prescient, he described a design approach so vivid that it became part of the vocabulary of an industry that hadn’t even been born yet.

“Consider a future device for individual use,” Bush wrote, “which is sort of a mechanized private file and library. It needs a name and, to coin one at random, memex will do. 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.”

There may have been no computing industry to speak of in 1945, but the memex subsequently became a Holy Grail of computing as digital technologies evolved. Computer pioneers like Stanford Research Institute’s Doug Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse, and visionaries like Ted Nelson credit Bush’s article as being the cornerstone for their own ideas.

Marc Andreesen, brilliant young designer of the enormously popular Internet Web browsers known as Mosaic and Netscape, came across “As We May Think” as an undergraduate at Illinois: “The memex article was amazing, and all the more so given that computer technology didn’t yet exist and Bush was able to both explore the fundamental ideas that we are still trying to realize today as well as propose an entirely analog-mechanical system to implement them.”

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Indeed, the Internet’s World Wide Web and the emergence of software “agents” that help people seek, sift and sort through the rising Himalayas of data are all arguably direct descendants of the stimulating ideas first articulated in “As We May Think.”

“Wholly new forms of encyclopedia will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified,” posited Bush.

“The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experiences of friends and authorities. . . . The physician, puzzled by a patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.”

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Today, these themes may seem a trifle familiar. In the turbulent wake of the atomic bomb and a world war won with breakthrough after technological breakthrough, Bush’s call for new thinking tools stunned thinking people who thought technology should be more about managing matter and energy than creativity and information.

In that respect, “As We May Think” resembles the movie “Casablanca”: The lines all seem like cliches today, but at the time, it was a bracing and heady brew of imagery and ideas.

And, like “Casablanca,” “As We May Think” is regarded as a classic. To be sure, the article is filled with grievous technical missteps and anachronisms. For example, Bush--a pioneer in the development of analog computing--never quite “got” digital technology. He pushed a microfilm-based model for his memex, something that was then (and remains today) technologically unfeasible.

Nevertheless, “As We May Think” is the article that today’s digerati point to as the seminal work in getting people involved in the design of knowledge networks and software agents.

Yes, it may be the 50th anniversary of The Bomb. But it is also the 50th anniversary of the first multimedia manifesto. Vannevar Bush was the author of both. It will be fascinating to see, 50 years hence, which contribution proves to be more powerful, enduring and influential.