Felicia Leicht
CS 10
"The Curse of the Xanadu"
9/10/02
Ted Nelson's and Vannevar Bush's ideas are inherently similar. It's clear that Bush's idea of the "memex" was a strong influence for Nelson's concept of hypertext, which led to his work on Xanadu. Nelson even reprinted the entirety of Bush's article "As We May Think," in one of his own books. The key link between ideas of both men is the concept of creating a machine/computer to augment and compensate for the faulty memory of human beings. Both men recognized the pressing need to preserve more than the human memory was capable of holding. Bush's idea of the memex was an entirely theoretical concept of a personalized library of information that would allow the owner to follow his own nonlinear train of thought to find information. Nelson took this to a new level with his concept of hypertext, which would allow a reader to branch off from the text they were reading to something related, but perhaps out of sequence. Nelson's vision of hypertext appears to be a broader, less personalized, but even more accessible version of Bush's nonsequential library contained within the memex. Nelson's need for a way to record and remember his own scattered pathways of thought led him to a similar conclusion to Bush, who was trying to find a way to preserve a record of the entirety of human history and discovery in the face of increasing specialization.