In the Bell Laboratories there is the converse of this machine, called a Vocoder. The loudspeaker is replaced by a microphone, which picks up sound. Speak to it, and the corresponding keys move.
From a linguistic standpoint, this is interesting, knowing how speech-to-text programs still make mistakes in trying to decipher what a person is saying, and the issues that have arisen continuously with differing dialects and the varied phonological inventories of different languages.
the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also be able to consult it,
It's amazing to think how much this number has exponentially grown since then, and how with external drives and the like, we can store even more than Bush was imagining in this comment and still easily access it through search functions.
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.
This flood of information is one that, with the widespread access to and ability to add to the internet, has become largely exacerbated in the modern day. This is a result Bush may not have been able to predict in his proposals for new directions of information-sharing technology, and the issues he discusses with the then-current methods of information sharing are problems we still encounter today.