“Consider a future device … in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”
He is talking about a computer/IPad/Smartphone without knowing that's what he's thinking about. It's likely that he never thought they would be so small or sleek.
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
Computer. IPad. Smartphone. He has the right idea of what it will do but very very wrong about how it works and what it looks like.
Now rapid selection can slide just the proper card into position in an instant or two, and return it afterward. Another difficulty occurs, however. Someone must read a total on the card, so that the machine can add its computed item to it. Conceivably the cards might be of the dry photography type I have described. Existing totals could then be read by photocell, and the new total entered by an electron beam.
It is just done electronically with a computer. But Bush was right that it would be improved.
If necessary, it could be made extremely fast by substituting thermionic-tube switching for mechanical switching, so that the full selection could be made in one one-hundredth of a second. No one would wish to spend the money necessary to make this change in the telephone system, but the general idea is applicable elsewhere.
again, wrong about the way it would be done but also wrong of him to assume that this would never occur for the telephone.
Selection devices of this sort will soon be speeded up from their present rate of reviewing data at a few hundred a minute. By the use of photocells and microfilm they will survey items at the rate of a thousand a second, and will print out duplicates of those selected.
He was right that this process would be sped up but wrong about how it would do so.
For this reason there still come more machines to handle advanced mathematics for the scientist. Som
I am no scientist but I know that Bush was right on this count.
As he ponders over his notes in the evening, he again talks his comments into the record. His typed record, as well as his photographs, may both be in miniature, so that he projects them for examination.
While Bush was wrong that the recorder would type what was said, he did get the recorder right. Also, he was half right of talking to Siri and your words appear on the screen. Lastly, one could argue that he thought of an Alexa like when she was told to do something like add "Eggs" to the shopping list.
The Encyclopædia 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.
Bush was right that we would be able to make normal sized things very small in terms of computer files, but he was wrong in how we would do it. He thought we would use some kind of microfilm when we are actually using bites of files.
but someone may speed it up, and it has no grain difficulties such as now keep photographic researchers busy. Often it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and to look at the picture immediately.
Bush called this one correctly. We can now see pictures immediately and without fear of grain.
On a pair of ordinary glasses is a square of fine lines near the top of one lens, where it is out of the way of ordinary vision. When an object appears in that square, it is lined up for its picture. As the scientist of the future moves about the laboratory or the field, every time he looks at something worthy of the record, he trips the shutter and in it goes, without even an audible click.
Similar to the idea of GoogleGlass, but still with the mind of old tech. There would be no shutter cord and it would not do this automatically.
Certainly progress in photography is not going to stop. Faster material and lenses, more automatic cameras, finer-grained sensitive compounds to allow an extension of the minicamera idea, are all imminent. Let us project this trend ahead to a logical, if not inevitable, outcome. 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. The lens is of universal focus, down to any distance accommodated by the unaided eye, simply because it is of short focal length. There is a built-in photocell on the walnut such as we now have on at least one camera, which automatically adjusts exposure for a wide range of illumination. There is film in the walnut for a hundred exposures, and the spring for operating its shutter and shifting its film is wound once for all when the film clip is inserted. It produces its result in full color.
While Bush is right that camera's will get smaller and produce color photographs, a normal camera now uses no film and is not embedded on anyone's head. Bush was still thinking about the technology of the past (their present) and thus didn't fully realize what technological advances could occur with the camera.
Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages.
Bush likely didn't realize that this power would be in the hands of the every-man. With handheld computers being all the rage now. It seems Bush thought scientists would be the first to come up with this type of technology, probably for the government or something similar.
the one that opened the door of her cell.
now calling it a "cell" like a prison
"To the rescue! Avenge the Machine! Avenge the Machine!"
like its alive
She told him to continue.
she's interested
He had been sent to Sumatra for the purpose of propagating the race.
Is this like breeding?
By her side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from the ages of litter-one book. This was the Book of the Machine.
like a bible
She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.
Yup, with the internet and social networking this is true in this day and age
The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery and it rolled her
This seems to be an idea for the electric wheelchair
"I am requesting that Mr. Bungle be toaded for raping Starsinger and I. I have never done this before, and have thought about it for days. He hurt us both."
Mr. Bungle's actions appear to have significantly impacted the victims