Review of 'Memory Machines The Evolution Of Hypertext' on Goodreads
4 stars
1) "It was the ultimate memory machine: a device that would store information associatively, keeping a record of all the interconnections between ideas – but never forget things. In this chapter I tell the story of a technical 'vision' that has survived for seventy years: Vannever Bush's [sic] memory extender, or Memex. Memex was an electro-optical device designed in the 1930s to provide easy access to information stored associatively on microfilm, an 'enlarged intimate supplement' to human memory. Literary and historical works routinely trace the history of hypertext through Memex, and so much has been written about it that it is easy to forget the most remarkable thing about this device: it has never been built. Memex exists entirely on paper. As any software engineer will tell you, technical white papers are not known for their shelf life, but Memex has survived for generations. What, then, can we say about …
1) "It was the ultimate memory machine: a device that would store information associatively, keeping a record of all the interconnections between ideas – but never forget things. In this chapter I tell the story of a technical 'vision' that has survived for seventy years: Vannever Bush's [sic] memory extender, or Memex. Memex was an electro-optical device designed in the 1930s to provide easy access to information stored associatively on microfilm, an 'enlarged intimate supplement' to human memory. Literary and historical works routinely trace the history of hypertext through Memex, and so much has been written about it that it is easy to forget the most remarkable thing about this device: it has never been built. Memex exists entirely on paper. As any software engineer will tell you, technical white papers are not known for their shelf life, but Memex has survived for generations. What, then, can we say about a dream that has never been fulfilled, but nonetheless recurs? Memex has become an inherited vision within hypertext literature."
2) "Nelson did not stay to work for Engelbart in 1967, though Engelbart 'half-invited' him. Nelson asked for a job, and 'Doug said, 'Well, we need a programmer right now.'' Nelson considered this for a moment and then declined. He didn't think he could teach himself to program quickly enough. Also, at a deeper level he felt that NLS, though brilliant at what it did, was too hierarchical.
'I did not see the opportunity of working with Doug because I thought, no, that's hierarchical, I just – I don't want to do that [...] And obviously if I joined that project I'd be living in that paradigm.'
NLS also had fixed-length character limits on all its statements, which was anathema to Nelson. These differences did, however, have a purpose. NLS was designed to boost work groups and make them smarter; it evolved around the technical activities of a group of engineers. For this reason, NLS emphasized keyboard commands, workflow and journaling. Xanadu was intended, like Bush's Memex, to be a very personalized system — to empower the individual. Xanadu would 'free the individual from group obtuseness and impediment' so that they could 'follow their interests or current line of thought in a way heretofore considered impossible.' To Nelson, links were not just part of an augmentation toolbox; they were the essence of a revolution – an ideological revolution. Literature need no longer be linear. We don't have to read the same books in the same order. We don't have to learn at someone else's pace and in someone else's direction. Hypertext furnishes the individual with choices: 'YOU GET THE PART YOU WANT WHEN YOU ASK FOR IT.'"
3) "FRESS occurred on the cusp of the network era – 1969. Memex was intended to be a personal machine, for use as an extension of one's own memory. Similarly, HES was neither networked nor multiuser. It was intended to be a personal (and scholarly) device, to produce printed documents for scholars but also to facilitate their individual associations within and between documents. But NLS and FRESS were pioneering networked multiuser hypertext systems. They were shifting across to a different technical phylum – from the personal, idiosyncratic memory aid to the public archive. From 1968 on, research into hypertext systems focused not on the creation of personal devices, but on distributed systems. The technology of networked communication became the early stages of the Internet."
4) "If Storyspace has an origin legend, then it begins with this multiple fiction; in Vassar College's version of the tale, Joyce 'looked at his little Apple II in the early '80s and said 'I'll bet you could do a story that would change every [sic] time you read it.' He called around, looking for such software, and it didn't exist.' Apocryphal stories aside, what is clear is that as a novelist, Joyce was thinking about the process of writing, and even more importantly, about the internal connections that exist in stories – connections that might, with the aid of a computer, be shaped by potential readers."
5) "Imagine a system whose trails do not fade. Imagine if documents and objects could be stored permanently, with their own unique address that never vanished, and retrieved at will. Imagine if any version of these documents could be visually intercompared side-by-side, like the teeth in a zipper – and the quotes or ideas in those documents could be traced back to their original source with a click. Imagine if we could separate the linking structure from the content, and that content could consequently be reused in a million different contexts. Imagine if there were no artificial distinctions between readers and writers. Imagine if we could capture the deeply tangled structure of knowledge itself, but make it better, make it permanent.
'EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED. In an important sense, there are no 'subjects' at all; there is only all knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly.'"
