Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Reading Response: As We May Think

Dr. Vannevar Bush begins his article by contemplating how scientists have made great things not from competing with each other, but by collaborating for a common cause (in his time, it was war). Next he talks about the technological achievements that were created in the past have become standard in his time period, cheap to make and are mass-produced. He then makes some predictions based on trends of advancement in technology. It is interesting to read his take on how cameras of the future will be, because as far as I know the "walnut cam" idea of his hasn't been used outside of intelligence agency purposes. People do have small, easy to use cameras now in the form of an iPhone or Evo, that do take hundreds if not more shots with very good fidelity. I'm not familiar with how professional photography and film development works even today, so I can only assume his predictions of developing film were accurate.

Bush also talks about how computers will be in the future. He says that they will do thousands of computations all at once, and perform a variety of other operations. He also gives a description which sounds like people working in an office space. He acknowledges that computers will be used beyond merely arithmetic calculations, saying how people will record data, then select a process of which to manipulate the data. This vague statement encompasses everything we do on a computer: running programs, applications, browsers and other software.

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