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No beating about this Bush

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Summer calls for something different.

 

It’s time to say a few words of gratitude for Bush.

 

No, not George W Bush - you won’t be surprised to hear.

And no, not Irving T Bush either, the hustling New York developer who built Bush House, the BBC’s grand and much-loved World Service headquarters in London, complete with its so-1920s, very Anglo-American, carved inscription: “To the Friendship of English-Speaking Peoples” -- in complete early ignorance of the thirty-three different languages the BBC would eventually end up broadcasting.

 

Far from it … the Bush of whom I want to make some August acknowledgment is Dr Vannevar Bush (pictured above) who this month sixty-two years ago was having his prophetic ideas digested by Washington DC’s more thoughtful elements, wherever they may have been summering.

 

Dr Bush was no relation at all to the dynasty that came to provide the White House's 41st and 43rd occupants, but rather he served as President Franklin D Roosevelt’s and then Harry S Truman’s Director of Scientific Research and Development. In August 1945 he had just delivered a remarkable document that presaged, even as World War Two was ending, today’s digital communications universe.

 

His study was called “Science: The Endless Frontier”, and it carried more than a whiff of the period’s technological optimism (- for all that the atomic bomb was what ushered in the post-war era, and that Bush had worked behind the scenes to encourage that dark invention).  In the field of what we now call information technology, Bush envisioned - sometimes allusively in this official report, and a little more concretely in a popularizing article he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly (July 1945’s edition pictured above) that was headlined “As We May Think” - a radical new way of handling information. He named it “The Memex”.

 

He was arguing that post-war science should dedicate itself to “the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge” and he conceived the Memex as an entity where the content of books, records and communications could be stored “and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility". He also foresaw that “wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them”.

 

Does that sound at all familiar?

 

Regarding that “mesh of associative trails”, it took another two decades before Ted Nelson (the Greenwich Village-born savant, ADHD-afflicted in childhood like many of his successors) started building upon Bush’s work, and in the process bequeathed to us all his invented terms “hyperlink”, and “hypertext” – essential pathways in his plan for enabling a reader to jump instantly from one electronic document to another.

 

Yes, I know that the ultra-cool Brit Tim Berners-Lee is generally credited with inventing the World Wide Web, but Nelson played a vital (and often overlooked or minimized) role in developing the mechanics that hold it together. (And, for e-trivia lovers, he once had lunch - just once, in 1989 - with Berners-Lee. It was in Sausalito, northern California, and they discussed what Nelson has recalled as “this very simple thing” Berners-Lee was working on.)

 

These were but steps along the lengthy, complicated road that brought Vannevar Bush’s far-sighted 1940s notion from the realm of scientific speculation onto the actual screen where you now - for good or ill - can read this column.