New Media Communication

Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion.
Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus
obtained and dropped into place. Business correspondence takes the same path.

There is, of course, provision for consultation of the record by the usual
scheme of indexing. If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its
code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before
him, projected onto one of his viewing positions.

A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the index. Any
given book of his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater
facility than if it were taken from a shelf.

All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of present-day
mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step, however, to associative
indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused
at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential
feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important
thing.

a trail

Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be
instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code
space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a
trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever
like that used for turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the
physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and
bound together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be
joined into numerous trails.

The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties
of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was
apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades.
He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he
runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves
it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the
two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he
inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining
it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the
elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow,
he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity
and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his
own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials
available to him.

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of
associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and
there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and
decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and
authorities.

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady
past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has
built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more
fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely
become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His
excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of
forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand,
with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

complexity and unreliability were synonymous.

Had a Pharaoh been given detailed and
explicit designs of an automobile, and had he understood them completely, it
would have taxed the resources of his kingdom to have fashioned the thousands
of parts for a single car, and that car would have broken down on the first
trip to Giza.

Let us project this trend
ahead to a logical, if not inevitable, outcome.

The
process is now slow, but someone may speed it up, and it has no grain
difficulties such as now keep photographic researchers busy. Often it would be
advantageous to be able to snap the camera and to look at the picture
immediately.