Reflection on As We May Think

I'm impressed by how Bush was able to predicted the very common and wide-applied computer technology in present day. The discussion about personal devices (memex) that more like personal computers today drives my interest. (The funny part is that this vision, like all visions of the future, still retains the shadow of the technology of the time as Bush pictured it as a desk with supplemental levers and special buttons.) What drives my attention is the way he kept pursuing to improve memex -- improving selection. At first it was using special code, then it was tying two items together that functions like our memory, and finally it was to select and search in a multi-person platform, which corresponds to the World Wide Web. But when it comes to today, people are still trying to improve selection in these ways! The newly developed technology of searching for images in chat logs by description, merchants trying to suggest items that might be of interest to users through associative search...It's still a work in progress.