"Wow" is the first thing that that comes to mind when reading As We May Think. Maybe not even "wow" the word itself, but moreso, the feeling; this article left me in awe, and for more reasons than just one.
After reading through the introduction and first section of the article, I found myself thinking, "Okay, when did Bregar say this article was written? 1945? Nah, I didn't hear him right, it can't have been written that long ago." Not one to ignore a pressing thought, I scrolled to the top of the page, and there it was: July 1945. What the heck? "Two centuries ago Leibnitz invented a calculating machine which embodied most of the essential features of the recent keyboard devices," (2).This sentence alone is enough to confuse the heck out of anyone (concerning time). Recent keyboard? Like the cute little white MacBook keys I'm typing on right now? Yet, there is the mention of this calculating machine? Ummm... you mean calculator, right? The graphing kind? This is why the article is so perplexing; Bush writes very sophisticatedly about technology, yet it is technology that is yet to be.
Bush writes about upcoming technology with pride and excitement, but now, nearly 65 years later, the technology he writes about is almost laughable. Take the dry photography, for instance. I honestly didn't even realize there was such thing as wet and dry photography. I'm old enough to remember non-digital cameras, and heck, I remember when I got my first digital camera ($300 dollars for a 3.notverymuch mega pixel, but I thought it was the bomb, and at the time, it was). However, what I remember pre-digicam is simply taking the camera to get its roll of film developed; if you were lucky, you had a really cool Polaroid... and sadly, Polaroids aren't even being made any more. The times are too digital. This makes me wonder- what would Bush have thought about digital cameras?!
And the Encyclopedia Britannica being reduced to the size of a matchbox? Hahaha! Try pictures, text, audio, and video fitting on something the size of a fingernail! However, this is the beginning of compression- and where would we be without compression? Just not too long ago, my mom and I were panicking because she needed to get a video she made onto her zip drive, but it was too big of a file. Then I remembered- we could just compress it! What a lifesaver :)
Vannevar Bush was sure an extraordinary man; although we may laugh now at the primitive technology that he speaks of in As We May Think... we need to remember that this article was written just at the tail end of World War II. That's before women/African Americans/other minorities even had rights! To think, Bush was speaking of and predicting the invention of various things, from speech recognition devices to personal computers to the internet- to even electronic encyclopedias. Now, over thirty years after Bush's death, we have everything he predicted and so much more. This makes me wonder- what would Vannevar Bush think now?
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