Robert McNees
Vannevar Bush, an electrical engineer who built one of the first analog computers, was born #OTD in 1890.
He headed the Office of Scientific Research and Development during WWII, proposed what became the National Science Foundation, and devised an early hypertext system.
Robert McNees
Bush and Hazen built their analog “differential analyzer” at MIT in the late 1920s.
It incorporated ideas from both Babbage and Kelvin (whose work was apparently not known to Bush) and could solve differential equations via integration.
In 1936, Bush hired a young electrical engineering graduate student to be his research assistant in charge of running the differential analyzer. His name was Claude Shannon.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0016003227900970?via%3Dihub
Robert McNees
Bush would serve as chairman of the National Defense Research Committee and later, during WWII, director of OSRD.
In these roles he shepherded efforts ranging from the Manhattan Project to medical research to the development of radar.
He was also (informally at first, and later on in an official capacity) the first Presidential Science Advisor, serving under both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S Truman.
Robert McNees
In July of 1945 Vannevar Bush wrote to President Truman, responding to a request made by Roosevelt in 1944.
He submitted "Science the Endless Frontier," a report outlining a plan for Federal support for the sciences and the establishment of the National Science Foundation.
Robert McNees
The report argues that we must address national security, economic, and social issues with the sort of concentrated scientific effort Bush had overseen throughout the war.
It was a call for dedicated support of science to advance the public good.
You can read a copy here: https://www.nsf.gov/about/history/vbush1945.htm
Robert McNees
That same month, July 1945, Vannevar Bush published "As We May Think" in The Atlantic.
It was a forward-looking essay that anticipated hypertext, the web, Wikipedia, and other information technologies in the form of a desk-like device he called a "memex."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
Robert McNees
Vannevar Bush, back in 1945, calling out you, specifically, for all the bad articles in your mess of open browser tabs.
Robert McNees
Back in 1995, Macromedia made this little video in Director to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Bush's prescient article.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c539cK58ees
Simon Lucy
See Zettelkasten, Card indexes, Codex using pages rather than scrolls. As a species we have organised knowledge for as long as we've brewed beer.
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