5.5.1 Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual.(Bush,1945, pg. 29)

5.5.2 One of the first visionaries of how computers may be used to change the way we work with information overflow in the future was Vannevar Bush, who was the Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in the US and co-ordinator of the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. His seminal "As We May Think" not only impacted thinkers when it was published in 1945 but continues to be read today. [5] In this essay Bush holds up an incentive for scientists to turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge after the fighting has ceased. Bush makes the point that the number of publications has become so overwhelming that it becomes difficult to keep track, remember, and recognise an important document.

5.5.3 It is in "As We May Think" that Bush introduces his prophetic concept of the Memex, or Memory Extension, an easily accessible, individually configurable storehouse of knowledge. Bush conceives of the Memex through myriad other technologies he describes in this essay as well: the Cyclops Camera, a photographic device "worn on the forehead" as well as film that can be developed instantly through dry photography, advances in microfilm, a "thinking" machine, and a Vocoder, which he describes as "a machine that could type when talked to." He predicts that the "Encyclopaedia 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's proposed mechanisms are based on a rational organisational system, which would solve and control the endless flow of information.

5.5.4 Around the same time Bush was developing the concepts of the Memex machine, H.G. Wells was imagining collective intelligence through his concept of a World Brain. In a collection of scientific essays he termed "constructive sociology, the science of social organisation" (Wells, 1938, xi) called World Brain, Wells proposes that the massive problems threatening humanity can only be solved by well co-ordinated human thinking and research. In the 1995 edition of World Brain, Alan Mayne writes a seventy-page introduction on contemporary technological developments, particularly the WWW, that parallel Wells's ideas. Without any knowledge of computer systems, Wells proposed the World Brain as a continuously updated and revised comprehensive encyclopaedia as a result of a systematic collaborative effort of a world-wide group of scholars, intellectuals, and scientists.

5.5.5 Alongside Bush's Memex, Wells's vision was prophetic of Douglas Engelbart's ideas of collective intelligence through the use of technology. Directly inspired by Bush, Engelbart pursued his vision and succeeded in developing a mouse pointing device for on-screen selection among other key innovations. Drawing on his experience as a radar operator in World War II, Engelbart saw in his mind how computers could visualise information through symbols on the screen: "When I saw the connection between the cathode-ray screen, an information processor, and a medium for representing symbols to a person, it all tumbled together in about a half an hour." (Rheingold, 1993, pg. 65).

5.5.6 Engelbart's seminal essay "The Augmentation of Human Intellect" in turn came to the attention of J.C.R. Licklider, who had himself been thinking about the connection between human brains and computers. Licklider's equally visionary paper around the same time, "Man-Computer Symbiosis," predicted a tight partnership of machines and humans in which machines would do the repetitive tasks, thereby allowing humans more time to think. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was a researcher and professor as well as at Lincoln Laboratory, a top-secret DOD research facility associated with MIT, Licklider, together with his graduate student Evan Sutherland, helped usher in the field of computer graphics. Later he moved to the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and, through his Defence Department connections, funded Engelbart's Augmentation Research Centre (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute, which produced the first word processors, conferencing systems, hypertext systems, mouse pointing devices and mixed video and computer communications. Engelbart's ARC became the original network information centre that centralised all information gathering and record keeping about the state of the network. Engelbart was particularly concerned with "asynchronous collaboration among teams distributed geographically." (Rheingold, 1993, pg. 72) His work had direct influence on the research at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which in turn was the inspiration for Apple Computers. [top]