"Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of
mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin
one at random, ``memex'' will do. A memex is a device in which an
individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and
which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed
and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a
distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works.
On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be
projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of
buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.
In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken
care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of
the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the
user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds
of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter
material freely.
Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for
insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals,
newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business
correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct
entry. On the top of the memex is a transparent plate. On this are
placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sort of things.
When one is in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be
photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film,
dry photography being employed.
The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and
properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the
short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in
the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent
books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an
encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it
projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and
ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items.
Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into
the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item.
When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available
materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a
side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables
of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his
own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of
materials available to him. . . . And his trails do not fade."
