Video Archives

Vannevar Bush

The MIT/Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium 1

The MIT/Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium was hosted at MIT on October 12-13, 1995, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Vannevar Bush's seminal article "As We May Think," published in the Atlantic Monthly, July 1945. As a speaker at the event, Doug Engelbart received VHS copies of all the sessions, which later surfaced as part of the Doug Engelbart Archives Initiative. In researching the origin of the videos, we were pleased to discover the original conference resources dating back to 1995 still available on the MIT and Brown University websites. An excellent summary description of the event was published in ACM Interactions the following year. See section Additional Resources below for links to more, including a Vannevar Bush timeline, photo gallery, and beautifully produced Memex Animation.

The video archives from the 1995 event are now available online at the Internet Archive, as listed below.

		MC: Andy van Dam    Intros and Historical Timeline [Bio]
		#1 Paul Kahn Visual tour of Bush's work [Bio|Memex Animation|Photos]

		#2 Doug Engelbart The Strategic Pursuit of Collective IQ [Abstract|Bio]
		#3 Ted Nelson Where the Trail Leads [Abstract|Bio]
		#4 Bob Kahn Augmenting Bush's Vision with Digital Technology [Abstract|Bio]
		#5 - Tim Berners-Lee Hypertext and Our Collective Destiny [Abstract|Bio|Text]
		#6 - Michael Lesk The Seven Ages of Information Retrieval [Abstract|Paper|Bio]
		#7 - Panel Discussion [Notes]
		#8 - Raj Reddy Bush's Intelligent Systems Revisited [Abstract|Bio]
		#9 - Lee Sproull Information Is Not Enough: Computer Support for Productive Work [Abstract|Bio]
		#10 - Alan Kay Simex: the neglected part of Bush's Vision [Abstract|Bio]
		#11 - Panel Discussion [Notes]

 

Influence on Doug Engelbart 2

Doug's copy of the article circa 1962 click here to see the article (courtesy Computer History Museum)

Doug read the article in 1945 on Philippine island of Leyte (click to enlarge)

In September 1945, shortly after arriving in the Phillippines to serve as a US Navy radar technician, then twenty year old Doug ran across the latest issue of Life Magazine which included a reprint of Vannevar Bush's article "As We May Think." He found the magazine in a Red Cross library located in a hut on stilts on the island of Leyte. Additional background on Doug Engelbart's first encounter with the article can be found in his Oral History Interview at Stanford University (search on "Vannevar Bush").

The article made a big impression on Doug at the time, but did not appear in his work until around 1961. When Doug was deep into developing his "augmentation framework", he dug up a copy of the article, which he studied in depth (see his notes in the margins in his copy of the article at right), and described in detail in his seminal 1962 report Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (beginning at paragraph 3a5), adding several quotes from Bush's article.

Doug also wrote a letter to Vannevar Bush while preparing this Report, seeking permission to quote his article, outlining his own work, and describing his encounters with Bush's 1945 article. He enclosed a summary description of his work titled "Program On Human Effectiveness". See also Doug's Abstract for his talk at this 1995 Bush Symposium for a glimpse into how his thinking evolved vis-a-vis Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think".

Additional Resources 3

• Bush's 1945 Article: As We May Think, original article by Vannevar Bush, Atlantic Monthly, July 1945. See also the 1945 Life Magazine reprint with illustration added.


• Event Websites: "As We May Think" - A Celebration - 1995 Symposium program, schedule, speaker abstracts and bios at MIT; see additional event resources in the Memex and Beyond Symposium webpages at Brown University.

Also at MIT:
A Difference Maker: Vannevar Bush - part of a special series spotlighting specific people and moments from MIT’s 150-year history who made a difference.
Vannevar Bush - Inventor of the Week Archives - on Bush's contribution to Hypertext


• Speakers' slides were captured and posted for the event, but are unsurprisingly no longer viewable


• Wikipedia: Vannevar Bush


• Event Article:   50 Years After 'As We May Think': The Brown/MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium, by Rosemary Simpson, Allen Renear, Elli Mylonas, and Andries van Dam, in ACM Interactions, 1996 (ACM subscribers click here)


• Bush Timeline:  Events in the Life of Vannevar Bush (created for the Symposium)


• Bush Photos:    A Photographic Appreciation (created for the Symposium)


• Memex Demo: Memex Animation on YouTube (created for the Symposium)


• Book:    From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind's Machine, 1991 by James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn, Academic Press, [Table of Contents|Book Review]


• From the Editor in Chief: A Retrospective on "As We May Think", by Robert E. Filman, IEEE Computer Society, July 2005, article marking the 60th anniversary


• As We May Think at 65, blog by Simon Harper, April 2010 (see also his June blog)


• Celebrating 65 Years of "As We May Think", blog post by Christina Engelbart, August 2010


• A day in the life of a personal archivist, blog post by Christina Engelbart, March 2011 describing the process involved in archiving the videos from this event, and researching and creating this webpage.