As We May Think

The title of this entry is also the title of an article written in 1945 by Dr. Vannevar Bush, then director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in the US. In this article, Bush envisaged a machine called the Memex, which in many ways has presaged the rise of the combination of the World Wide Web and Personal Computers. Indeed, Internet pioneers such as Ted Nelson took Bush’s idea of "associative links" between pieces of information and developed the idea of Hypertext (the term was coined by Nelson) – a simplification of which forms the basis of the Web today.

I was reminded of all this today when I came across a video published on the Channel 9 web site. The video is an interview with two of Microsoft’s researchers, Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmel about the "MyLifebits" project. Gordon Bell is one of my IT heroes – he was the man behind DEC’s original line of mini-computers, the PDPs. Another is Jim Gray, whose groundbreaking work with databases has led him to end up working with Bell on MyLifebits in Microsoft Research.

So what is MyLifebits? In a nutshell, it is the attempt to realise Bush’s Memex – "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". The project has extended some of Bush’s original ideas to now include capturing information when on the move. A slide from a PowerPoint presentation on MyLifebits is included below to give some idea of the range of information that is being captured.

The video is interesting, not just for the experience of hearing Bell and Gemmell talk about their work, but also to see the project in action with some demonstrations of how a Memex-like device may not be "As we may Think", but become "How We May Think".