Looks like someone blinked.

I have read prophesying literature before, but the amount of detail that our Mr. Bush goes into makes me think he did not heed the Doctor’s very specific warning and blinked sometime in the early 2000s… or maybe he met someone who had done so and took to writing down everything his new friend had to tell him about the future.

As much as I would like to believe my own theory, let’s move on!

I have to be honest I had to read this article a few times over. However, I noticed I was not alone in this! I’m not sure if it’s the stylistic differences of the times, but I felt I was reading a scientific fiction novel instead of a scientific article. It was interesting to read (over and over again) nonetheless.

I work for a branch of the government that is in the process of digitizing historic records. At the Bureau of Land Management, we are scanning, indexing, and uploading federal land plats and field notes of all of the western states – so I definitely can get on board with Bush’s thoughts on how important it is to be able to communicate with people quickly and efficiently, especially when it comes to obtaining information that someone finds important. Having a system that is clean and quick is important not only to the individuals seeking this information, but it is important to those of us who work with the information and must try to help everyone find what they’re looking for. We of course have our paper and solid copies of everything we upload online, but it is amazingly faster to have it on a server available immediately (so long as the server hasn’t crashed and the power is on).

Now, that was not the most interesting part of the article for me! I was really amazed at how detailed Vannevar’s predictions were about cameras: it was almost as if he had seen a digital camera first hand. He could have also been describing something more like a Polaroid where you take the picture and there is no dark room processes necessary, the picture just comes out and it takes only a few moments for the photo to develop.

Will there be dry photography? It is already here in two forms. When Brady made his Civil War pictures, the plate had to be wet at the time of exposure. Now it has to be wet during development instead. In the future perhaps it need not be wetted at all. There have long been films impregnated with diazo dyes which form a picture without development, so that it is already there as soon as the camera has been operated. An exposure to ammonia gas destroys the unexposed dye, and the picture can then be taken out into the light and examined. The process is now slow, 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.

The detail he includes made me shake my head with a bit of astonishment, and it was really at this point in the article that I decided I was interested in reading it a second time to make sure I had not missed anything I should not have just glossed over lightly.

By my final read-through, although a lot of the words contained within the article still needed my further research to more so be able to understand them (which proved only somewhat successful), I found myself more and more surprised at how accurate Bush was in his predictions. Machines that can calculate so you do not have to do it by hand every time, machines that can be programmed to understand logic and human thinking, machines that can categorize and index, and he even essentially predicted the creation of Wikipedia:

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.

I will definitely set this article aside for further reading and research later down the road. I found it enjoyable, and useful in its own ways, and I am hoping that by the end of the semester I will be able to read and understand it fully.  Right now it leaves me thinking that I don’t know. I just don’t know. I really just don’t know. I’m afraid I really just don’t know. I’m afraid even I really just don’t know. I have to tell you I’m afraid even I really just don’t know…

Either way, Vannevar would be patting himself on the back rather proudly if he could see just how many things he was right about if he were still around today.