Comment by ricksunny
2 years ago
Does anyone know if TBL was inspired by Vannnevar Bush's Memex proposal at all?
Progressively through time we hear references to Memex as 'predicted computers', 'predicted search' 'predicted hypertext', "predicted AI",
to which I would add 'predicted tagging' and 'predicted recommendation engines'
[note the steady progression of our own technology through time reflected in the above list]
And there's still at least one more Memex prediction of something useful that I feel we still haven't produced yet.
edit (Ah I see that the wikipedia article for TBL mentions Memex front-and-center, so a pretty trivially identifiable association I guess.)
According to his own words, he wasn’t aware of Bush, Engelbart, or Nelson when he started working on Enquire, but hypertext more generally was known to him. He became aware of those other men and their work over time and their ideas helped to refine his own.
Thanks for that!
Incidentally, Vannevar Bush's Oral History 14-part document https://archivesspace.mit.edu/repositories/2/resources/687 seems to have served as an early experiment in prototyping hypertext. It has lots of [X-Ref] items throughout that refer to other relevant parts of the (1000+ page) oral history. I'm not aware of that being a common documentation practice at the time, so I see it as an intentional prototype effort on his part.