Slashdot had a story commemorating sixty years Vannevar Bush‘s As We May Thunk. The signal-to-noise of comments on slashdot stories is usually too low to be good reading (even browsing at +5), but commentary on this story was surprisingly good. Notably, there was the link to this story on Bush by Wired.
I find it amazing that, 60 years ago, a man from a pre-PC world could form theories on managing information overload. And it is amazing how similar the solutions of today are, compared to those he penned. Yes, there are notable, fundamental differences–Bush imagined more large-structured information management (extracting big-picture structure through the tracking of entire paths of browsing history), while current solutions to manging information thrive on small, local structure (google exploiting only first-degree links from page-to-page, del.icio.us’ ontology built from simple non-hierarchical tags, wikipedia’s dictionary-based-lookup, and of course the naive surface-string-search used by nearly every search engine in existence). I wonder if the future will find us moving towards his ideas of information management, or if ours will prove better.
Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, Vanderwal’s Personal Info Cloud, Microsoft’s My Life Bits, MIT’s Haystack. The information age has seen a tastes (or, perhaps, distant faint smells) of the fruits of paradise that Bush dreamed. What will the next 60 years of harvest bring?