18 quotes
The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.
As We May Think (1945)
There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things.
As We May Think (1945)
Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems.
As We May Think (1945)
A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.
As We May Think (1945)
There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.
As We May Think (1945)
Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose.
As We May Think (1945)
Babbage, even with remarkably generous support for his time, could not produce his great arithmetical machine. His idea was sound enough, but construction and maintenance costs were then too heavy.
As We May Think (1945)
If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.
As We May Think (1945)
The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk.
As We May Think (1945)
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.
As We May Think (1945)
What are the scientists to do next?
As We May Think (1945)
Machines with interchangeable parts can now be constructed with great economy of effort. In spite of much complexity, they perform reliably. Witness the humble typewriter, or the movie camera, or the automobile.
As We May Think (1945)
Technical difficulties of all sorts have been ignored, certainly, but also ignored are means as yet unknown which may come any day to accelerate technical progress as violently as did the advent of the thermionic tube.
As We May Think (1945)
The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.
As We May Think (1945)
The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3 millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice.
As We May Think (1945)
Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.
As We May Think (1945)
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.
As We May Think (1945)
The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record.
As We May Think (1945)