Vannevar Bush's Memex

The beginning of computers and computer science the issue of memory and storage has always existed and what is a better way to store information, and the growing need to store more and more, but in as little space as possible. What Vannevar Bush imagined is still a goal today, but not exactly in the manner he described-a table with buttons, screens, microfilm, and levers, instead a compact machine with buttons and compact hard drives based on the same idea-the user can to store information based on the user's personal filing system, similar to how the information is stored in their brain. The issue is the computer still uses traditional methods of storing data-machine code, required CS class is either named, Introduction to Algorithms or Introduction to Data Structures. In the class, I learned the importance of the speed/memory/costs to store information such when a search for a specific entry and execution of code needs to be light weight, but quick. One program I wrote in my Introduction to Data Structures class searched and retrieved items within a given text took the code several minutes to find the key phrase within the text if the text was longer than about a page of text. The goal of the assignment was to execute the code in under a minute. I rewrote the algorithm through another method and it executed the program in less than 15 seconds on average. The way information is store, inserted, deleted, and retrieved is still a constant battle.

Today, there are various tech companies such as the one mentioned in the tweet linked, Evernote, that aim to help store information closer to how the user interacts with it. I use Evernote and love it. Evernote is constantly improving their product by adding more functions to it in order to aid the user in storing all types of information, and organizing the information so it is a bit easier for the user to retrieve it and its associated files. Other projects include- Microsoft's MyLifeBits, and DARPA's. The tweet really highlights how far coding and machinery has come since 1945-in the ability to store millions of files on a small device-a phone, a USB, etc, and the desire in today's ever growing information and electronic centered society to have machines work similar to human brains to improve its functions, improve access to information. However, the tweet neglects the limits that exist in how today's computers are designed using x86 processors, which is the standard today. x86 has a lot of flaws to it especially concerning how information is stored on the different registers within the processor. These flaws allow the machines to be hacked, and other limits, but since it is the standard and the flaws are relatively known- it keeps being used. This is path dependent. It will be interesting to see how technology companies create apps to aspire to Bush's "Memex," and if any innovations in processors are needed to accomplish it.

Source: https://twitter.com/indieschoollib/status/478731075536297984