Vannevar Bush: Hypertext Prophet
Vannevar Bush is an unlikely cyberculture hero. After all, he was F.D.R.'s World War II science czar, organized the Manhattan Project and helped create the postwar military-industrial-university complex. But the onetime professor at M.I.T.--where he built a massive, gear-driven analog computer called the differential analyzer--was also a prophet. In 1945, dismayed by the wartime info overload, he proposed a desktop machine, the "memex," that would display text and pictures (from a microfilm library) at the press of a button. Presciently, Bush envisioned users of his proto-PC following trails of knowledge along storable hypertext "links," much like today's Web surfers.
--By Frederic Golden
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MANOJ, a police officer stationed in Mumbai, on why he and other police don't criticize their leaders for failing to meet promises to improve dire working conditions after last fall's deadly attacks on the Taj hotel
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MANOJ, a police officer stationed in Mumbai, on why he and other police don't criticize their leaders for failing to meet promises to improve dire working conditions after last fall's deadly attacks on the Taj hotel
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