Editing Memex (section)

==Development==
===An electromechanical memex device===
In "[[As We May Think]]", [[Vannevar Bush]] describes a memex as an electromechanical device enabling individuals to develop and read a large self-contained research library, create and follow associative trails of links and personal annotations, and recall these trails at any time to share them with other researchers. This device would closely mimic the [[Association (psychology)|associative]] processes of the human mind, but it would be gifted with permanent recollection. As Bush writes, "Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race".{{Sfn|Bush|1945|loc=Section 8}}

The technology used would have been a combination of electromechanical controls and [[microfilm]] cameras and readers, all integrated into a large desk. Most of the microfilm library would have been contained within the desk, but the user could add or remove microfilm reels at will. A memex would hypothetically read and write content on these microfilm reels, using electric photocells to read coded symbols recorded next to individual microfilm frames while the reels spun at high speed, stopping on command. The coded symbols would enable the memex to index, search, and link content to create and follow associative trails.

The top of the desk would have slanting translucent screens on which material could be projected for convenient reading. The top of the memex would have a transparent platen. When a longhand note, photograph, memoranda, or other things were placed on the platen, the depression of a lever would cause the item to be photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film.

According to Bush, the memex could become "a sort of mechanized private file and library".{{Sfn|Bush|1945|loc=Section 6}} The memex device as described by Bush "would use microfilm storage, dry photography, and analog computing to give postwar scholars access to a huge, indexed repository of knowledge any section of which could be called up with a few keystrokes."{{Sfn|Wardrip-Fruin|Montfort|2003|p=35}}

===Associative trails===
An associative trail as conceived by Bush would be a way to create a new ''linear'' sequence of microfilm frames across any arbitrary sequence of microfilm frames by creating a chained sequence of links in the way just described, along with personal comments and ''side trails''. At the time, Bush saw the current ways of indexing information as limiting and instead proposed a way to store information that was analogous to the mental association of the human brain: storing information with the capability of easy access at a later time using certain cues (in this case, a series of numbers as a code to retrieve data).<ref>{{Cite web |last=Kaz |first=Matt |title=Vannevar Bush and Memex |url=http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mattkaz/history/memex3.html |website=The World Wide Web: the Beginning and Now |publisher=University of Michigan}}.</ref>

===Other features===
According to Bush, the memex would have features other than linking. The user could record new information on microfilm, by taking photos from paper or from a touch-sensitive translucent screen. A user could "...insert a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. ...Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him."{{Sfn|Bush|1945|loc=Section 7}} A user could also create a copy of an interesting trail (containing references and personal annotations) and "...pass it to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into the more general trail."{{Sfn|Bush|1945|loc=Section 7}} 

In September 1945, [[ Life magazine|''Life'' magazine]] published an illustration by [[Alfred D. Crimi]] showing the "Memex desk". According to ''Life'' magazine, the Memex desk "would instantly bring files and material on an subject to the operator's fingertips". The mechanical core of the desk would also include "a mechanism which automatically photographs longhand notes, pictures and letters, then file them in the desk for future reference."{{sfn|Barnet|2013|p=27}}

===Extending, storing, and consulting the record of the species===
Bush's 1945 "[[As We May Think]]" idea for the memex extended far beyond a mechanism that might augment the research of one individual working in isolation. In Bush's idea, the ability to connect, annotate, and share both published works and personal trails would profoundly change the process by which the "world's record" is created and used:

{{blockquote|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. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. ...

The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail that stops only on the salient items and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trailblazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected. {{emdash}} ''[[As We May Think]]'' 
}}