Vannevar Bush's article As We May Think, written in 1945, is very interesting. In it, Bush forecasts the invention of things that are common today. He talks about the benefit of technology to human health and how inventions have made things easier for people.
Bush talks about the future of photography and talks about a tiny walnut-sized camera along with "dry photography." Sure enough, we now have tiny digital cameras that people use every day. He also writes about advanced counting machines that we know as calculators.
Bush foresaw computer programming as a way for us to keep track of records and perform tedious tasks like storing data for later use. He talks about advanced data entry and inventory systems for department stores.
His idea of a machine called the "Memex" is what we no know as a computer and the Internet. He talks about how data can be compressed and stored in the memex and we will be able to click on a button to bring up a piece of data and project it onto a screen. He also talks about a way to mark the pieces of data, which is what we do when we give a file a filename and save it. He then talks about making a trail of related files and going through them one by one, which is basically the way we move from file to file by clicking on hyperlinks.
Bush was able to forecast the future of technology to an amazing degree. It's especially interesting to read this article knowing that it was written in 1945.
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