Vanivar Bush: “As We May Think” (As We May Think)
“It was not a war of scientists, it was a war in which everyone took part. Scientists who had buried their old professional disagreements, for the sake of the common cause, shared much and learned a lot together. It was intoxicating to work in effective partnerships. Now, for many, it is coming to an end.
What will scientists do next? ”
It will be about an essay by American engineer Vanivar Bush “As We May Think”, published in The Atlantic magazine in 1945 . In it, Bush predicted the onset of the information age and the appearance of some of its manifestations, for example, personal computers, the Internet. The article describes the hypertext implemented "in the gland."
')
This work inspired and was a reference point for the pioneers of information technology by Joseph Liclayder (computer network, time sharing), Douglas Engelbart (mouse, NLS, GUI, proof ), Ted Nelson (hypertext, Xanadu), etc.
In 1940, Vanivar Bush was appointed chairman of the National Defense Research Committee of the United States, and from 1941 to 1947 he headed the organization of the committee’s successor, the Bureau of Research and Development, which coordinated the efforts of the scientific community (6,000 leading scientists of the country) for military defense, nuclear weapons and the Manhattan Project.
Biography on Wikipedia .
On wikipedia
PDF
Scan of the newspaper itself
Excerpts from the article (in Russian)
Under the cut - translation of the first half of the article.
(for the translation thanks to Alexey Vorsin)
As Director of the Office of Research and Improvement, Dr. Vanivar Bush coordinated about six thousand leading American scientists in the field of applied military research. In this landmark article, they put the urge for scientists, in case the struggle stops. He urged the people of science to pay attention to the enormous task of making the repository of knowledge that we had accumulated become more accessible and terrifying. Over the years, our discoveries have expanded human physical capabilities, as well as the capabilities of the mind. The falling hammers, which became the continuation of the blacksmith’s hand, the microscopes that sharpened the eye, and the machines of destruction and detection, are the latest results, but the results signify the end of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, the tools in his hands, which, if well developed, will give a person access and endurance to manage the knowledge accumulated over the centuries. The perfection of such peaceful instruments should be the first goal of our scientists when they are freed from their military work. As Emerson’s famous message in 1837 in The American Scientist, this article by Dr. Bush calls for the establishment of a new relationship between a thinking person and the totality of our knowledge.
It was not a war of scientists, it was a war in which everyone took part. Scientists who had buried their old professional disagreements, for the sake of the common cause, shared much and learned a lot together. It was intoxicating to work in effective partnerships. Now, for many, it is coming to an end.
What will scientists do next?
For biologists, and in part for medical scientists, there may be some hesitancy in the fact that their military work dictated to them to abandon the old approaches. Many, of course, will be able to continue their military research in their good old laboratories in peacetime. Their goals remain much the same.
These are physicists, those who were most cruelly strayed from their paths, who left academic careers to create strange destructive devices, who had to develop new methods for unforeseen tasks. They did their part of working with the devices that made it possible to defeat the enemy. They worked together with physicists of our allies. They felt the thirst for accomplishments. They were part of a great team. Now that the world has been reached, some ask where they can take on the task.
What could be the continuing benefits from the use of the achievements of science and the new tools that human research has created? First, these tools have strengthened man’s control over the material world. The clothing of a person has improved, his food, his refuge; these tools secured a person, partially freed him from the shackles of the struggle for survival. They gave him advanced knowledge of his own biological processes, so he gained ever-increasing freedom from disease and increased life expectancy. They highlighted the relationship between psychological and physiological functions, thus foreshadowing the best mental health.
Science has accelerated communication between people; made it possible to write down ideas and the ability to manipulate this information, to extract the necessary, thus, knowledge develops and persists throughout the life of the people, not the individual.
This is a growing mountain of research. BUT there is growing evidence that we are plunging into a swamp, due to growing specialization. A researcher freezes in indecision among hundreds of other finds and conclusions that he doesn’t have enough time to realize, much less time to remember than these finds and conclusions exist. However, specialization is becoming increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to build bridges between disciplines is, accordingly, apparent.
Professionally, our methods of transmitting and reviewing research results emerged several generations ago and are completely inadequate to their purpose. If the total time spent on writing scientific papers and reading them could be calculated, the difference between these time values would be amazing. Those who honestly try to keep up with the flow of thought, even in a limited area, while concentrating and continuously reading, will most likely flee in horror, having read the calculations of how much effort from the previous efforts will have to be repeated. Mendel's ideas about the laws of genetics were inaccessible for a whole generation, because his publications did not reach those few people who were able to grasp and develop them; and this kind of catastrophe will undoubtedly happen to us again when something really significant is lost in the stream of irrelevant.
The problem is seen not so much in the fact that we create an excessive number of publications on today's topics, in all their diversity and scope, but in the fact that the publications themselves have gone far beyond our ability to benefit from them. The totality of human experience is increasing at an exorbitant rate, and the ways in which we progress in this maze to the one we need are the same as in the days of sailing ships.
The emergence of a powerful new toolkit - a harbinger of future changes. Photocells able to “see”, advanced photography techniques, with which you can take pictures of what’s visible and what’s not, thermoelectronic tubes that can control significant energies with less effort than a mosquito on the flap of a wing, cathode-ray tubes, reproducing an image with such a frequency that in comparison with it a microsecond is a long time, relay circuits that can manage complex sequences of actions more reliably than any person and a thousand times faster - an abundance of technical solutions, helping transform scientific records.
Two centuries ago, Leibniz came up with a counting machine, which has most of the mandatory attributes of existing devices with a keyboard, but is not yet embodied in reality. The economic aspect of the situation plays against it: the efforts that go on developing such a machine, until the machine goes into mass use, exceed the efforts that will be saved thanks to it, as long as we can do with a pen and paper. Moreover, frequent failures of such machines will be inevitable, so that we cannot rely on them; at the moment, and for a long time to come, complexity and unreliability are synonymous.
Babbage, even with incredibly generous support for his time, could not build his great arithmetic machine. His idea sounded convincing, but the creation and maintenance in those days were very heavy. If Pharaoh had all the necessary blueprints for building a car, and even if he knew perfectly well what he was doing, the resources of the whole Egyptian kingdom would have been needed to make all these hundreds of parts for one car, and such a car would surely break in its first trip before the pyramids.
Machines with interchangeable parts can now be built with significant savings in effort. In spite of its high complexity, they work very reliably. Evidence of this: typewriter, movie camera, car. Electrical contacts no longer put sticks in our wheels as soon as they became clear.
Let me remind you about automated telephone exchanges, in which there are hundreds of thousands of such contacts and they are still reliable. Weaves of metal enclosed in a thin glass container, wire heated to a dazzling shine in a thermo-cathode lamp from the radio, are hundreds of millions of such devices, divided into groups, included in connectors and it all works! The finest elements, the creation of which required an incredible accuracy of work, and on which the best masters of the guild would work for months, are now made for thirty cents. The world has entered an era of cheap and complex, fault-tolerant devices; and something will certainly come next.
The record, in order to be useful for science, must continue uninterruptedly, it must be stored, and above all this, it must be possible to access it. At the moment, we traditionally record with the help of letters and photographs, followed by printing; In addition, we record on film, on plates and on magnetic wire. Even if new ways are not added, the existing ones are undoubtedly in the process of modification and development.
Indeed, progress in photography is not going to stop. Faster materials and lenses, more automated cameras, fine-grained, sensitive formulations that allow the development of the mini-camera idea are inevitable. Let me predict the logical, if not inevitable, continuation of this trend. The future amateur photographer wears a knob on his forehead, slightly larger than a walnut. This device captures images of three square millimeters, which can then be projected or enlarged, which, after all, exceeds our existing capabilities only 10 times. Universal focus lenses, at any distance the naked eye is capable of, simply due to the short focal length. The nut has a built-in photocell, the same is in at least one automatic camera right now and allows you to automatically adjust the exposure in a wide range of illumination. The film in the nut is enough for hundreds of frames and the spring that moves the shutter and rolls the film starts up only once when we insert the cassette. This device produces full-color photos. This device may well be stereoscopic and can be recorded using glass eyes spaced apart, since striking advances in stereoscopic technology are already on the way.
The cord that pulls the shutter can go down the sleeve so that the person can easily use it. Short press and the picture is ready. On ordinary glasses there is a square of thin lines, almost at the upper edge of the lenses, outside the usual viewing angle, where we do not notice these lines. When we see an object through this square, the lines indicate the boundaries of the future image. When a scientist of the future, in a laboratory or a field, sees something worth being captured, it is enough for him to pull the shutter: he will do all the work, silently. Sounds like a fantasy? The only fantastic thing about this is the idea to display all the resulting photos.
Will a dry photo appear? It already exists in two forms. When Brady took his photos of the Civil War, the photographic plate should have been wet all the time. Now the film should be wet only during the development. In the future, it may not be necessary to wet it at all. For a long time there existed a film with splashes of diazotized dye, which is a type of photo without development, so the technology of dry photography is already here, since the cameras came into use. Exposure with ammonia gas destroys the unexposed dye, and the photo can be taken out and checked. The process at the moment is slow, but it can be accelerated, and there are no particular difficulties in this, such as those that are currently occupied by photography researchers.
Another process is also being used, also slow and awkward. For fifty years, paper has been used, which darkens where electrical contact touches it, due to the chemical reaction produced by the iodine compound included in the paper. This technology can be used to write, with the help of the pointer, which leaves a trail. The electrical potential of the pointer may change, making the line lighter or darker.
This scheme is now used in facsimile. The pointer draws a set of closely spaced lines through all the paper, one on top of the other. While the pointer is moving, its electric potential varies, depending on the alternating current coming from the remote station, where the photocell scans the image. At each segment, the line is as dark as the point on the image that the photocell scans. When the entire image is transferred, the replica will appear in the output window.
The image will be read by the photocell as well, line by line, as photographed earlier. This entire device is a camera with an attached device that allows you to transfer an image, which allows you to print it remotely. Also, it will give another way to dry photos, in which the photo will be ready at the same time as it was taken.
You need to be a brave person to argue that this process will always remain awkward, slow and defective. Television equipment today transmits sixteen reliably good images per second, and in fact there are only two fundamental differences in its device from the process described above. First, the recording is made by a beam of moving electrons, instead of a pointer, for the reason that the electrons move faster. Secondly, the matter is in the screen, which starts to glow instantly when an electron hits it, unlike film or paper, which, moreover, change forever. This speed is necessary in television, as the image moves.
Using a chemically impregnated film instead of a luminous screen, the device will be able to transfer one image instead of a series, and a high-speed camera will allow you to get a dry photo.
("It was a time when the screen was taken."
Impregnated film should act much faster (needs to be far faster in action) than existing copies, but this is quite achievable. A more serious drawback in this scheme is that the film will need to be placed in a vacuum chamber, because the electron beam behaves normally only in a rarefied medium. This difficulty can be avoided by forcing the electron beam to move on one side of the partition, and the film is pressed against the other side of the partition under pressure, if such a partition allows electrons to pass perpendicularly through the surface without dispersing the beam. Such partitions, in rough form, can undoubtedly be made, and are unlikely to be able to stop the development of the idea as a whole.
Micrographs, like dry photos, have a great future. The basic idea is to reduce the size of a record and read it through a projection, instead of reading it directly, and this idea opens up too many possibilities to be ignored. The combination of optical projection and size reduction is already producing results such as scientific microfilms, and the potential of this technology is extremely appealing. At the moment, microfilm, reduced by 20 times, gives the same clear image as the material of the original size. The possibilities are limited by the graininess of the film, the perfection of the optical system, and the efficiency of the light receivers used. All this is rapidly developing.
Imagine a hundredfold decrease in the future. Imagine a film as thick as paper, of course, and a thinner film can be used. Even if these conditions are met, we will get a ten thousandth difference in size between the original book and the microfilm recorded. The British Encyclopedia fits in a matchbox, a library with millions of volumes on half the desktop. All that humanity has recorded since it learned to write: all magazines, newspapers, books, treatises, advertising booklets, correspondence, has a volume comparable to a billion books, and all this volume, properly assembled and compressed, will easily fit in a mobile van. Simple compression, of course, is not enough; It is required not only to create and keep a record, but also to address it. We will consider this aspect later. Even a great modern library is not fully available for research, you have to pinch a little bit.
Compression is important when it comes to cost. The material for the microfilm with the British Encyclopedia will cost 5 cents (nickel - nickel), and can be sent by mail per cent. How much does a million copies cost? On the printing of a newspaper sheet takes a small part of the cent. All British Encyclopedia material in microfilm will fit on a sheet of eight and a half by eleven inches. As soon as this becomes possible, with the help of photographic technologies of the future, the cost price of a copy in good quality will be less than a cent. Preparing the original for copying? This brings us to the discussion of the next aspect.
To record, we take a pen or knock on the typewriter keys. Then comes the turn of the correction and cleansing of the text, entailing an intricate process of typographical typing, printing and distribution of finished products. What if we assume that in the future the writer will be spared the need to write or print, directly slandering text to write? He comes in very indirectly, slandering the shorthand painter or wax cylinder; but all the elements necessary for him to directly record the voice in the form of a printed text already exist. All he needs to do is use the capabilities of existing mechanisms and change his language.
At the last World Show, the Voder machine was presented. The girl pressed the keys and the car reproduced quite recognizable speech. No human speech was introduced into the procedure, at any stage, the keys simply combined the vibrations produced by the electric current, which were then output to the loudspeaker. In Bell's lab there is an alteration of this machine, called the Vocoder. The loudspeaker is replaced by a microphone that perceives sound. You speak into it, and certain keys move. This may be one of the elements of the above system.
We find another element in the stenotypical machine (stenotype, a typewriter that prints in whole words), a confusing device that is usually found at public events. The girl is bored knocking on her keys, an annoying gaze drills down the hall and the lecturer. From this typewriter a printed strip appeared, recording in phonetically simplified language what the speaker was saying. Later this strip is reprinted in ordinary speech, since it itself is understandable only to initiates. Combine these two elements, we get a machine that will print what we say.
, . , , . , ; , .
, . , . , , . , . , . , . , , , , .
, , , . . , , , — . .
– , - . , : , , , . , , ; , , , .
- , . , , . , , - , . .
– . , , , , , , , .
: , , , ; , (). , , , .
, , . , 100 000 . .
, , , . , , , , , . . . , , .
To be continued
( — magisterludi )
. , , . — «MEMEX» — , .
, , . , — . , , . , , , . — — MEMEX.
, . . , MEMEX .
I will try to get to the primary sources of IT-technologies, to understand how they thought and what concepts were in the minds of the pioneers, what they dreamed about, how they saw the world of the future. Why did you think “computer”, “network”, “hypertext”, “intelligence amplifiers”, “collective problem solving system”, what meaning did they put into these concepts, what tools they wanted to achieve a result.
I hope that these materials will serve as an inspiration for those who are wondering how to go “from Zero to Unit” (to create something that had never happened before). I would like IT and “programming” to stop being just “coding for the sake of dough”, and recall that they were conceived as a lever to change themethods of warfare, education, a way of working together, thinking and communication, as an attempt to solve world problems and answer facing humanity. Something like this.
0 March. Seymour papert
March 1. Xerox alto
March 2, "Call Jake." NIC and RFC history
March 3, Grace "Grandma COBOL" Hopper
March 4 Margaret Hamilton: "Guys, I'll send you to the moon"
March 5, Hedy Lamarr. And in the movie naked to play and torpedo the bullet into the enemy
March 7 Gorgeous Six: girls who had a thermonuclear explosion calculated
March 8, "Video Games, I'm your father!"
March 9th Happy Birthday to Jeff Raskin
March 14 Joseph "Lick" Liclider: "Intergalactic computer network" and "Symbiosis of man and computer"
March 15 Vanivar Bush: “How We Can Think” (As We May Think)
What will scientists do next? ”
It will be about an essay by American engineer Vanivar Bush “As We May Think”, published in The Atlantic magazine in 1945 . In it, Bush predicted the onset of the information age and the appearance of some of its manifestations, for example, personal computers, the Internet. The article describes the hypertext implemented "in the gland."
')
This work inspired and was a reference point for the pioneers of information technology by Joseph Liclayder (computer network, time sharing), Douglas Engelbart (mouse, NLS, GUI, proof ), Ted Nelson (hypertext, Xanadu), etc.
In 1940, Vanivar Bush was appointed chairman of the National Defense Research Committee of the United States, and from 1941 to 1947 he headed the organization of the committee’s successor, the Bureau of Research and Development, which coordinated the efforts of the scientific community (6,000 leading scientists of the country) for military defense, nuclear weapons and the Manhattan Project.Biography on Wikipedia .
- Science Advisor to President Roosevelt.
- He initiated the development of a differential analyzer , an analog computer that could solve differential equations with 18 independent variables.
- Supervisor Claude Shannon (founder of information theory) and Frederick Terman ("father" of Silicon Valley).
As We May Think
On wikipedia
Scan of the newspaper itself
Excerpts from the article (in Russian)
Under the cut - translation of the first half of the article.
(for the translation thanks to Alexey Vorsin)
Editor's foreword.
As Director of the Office of Research and Improvement, Dr. Vanivar Bush coordinated about six thousand leading American scientists in the field of applied military research. In this landmark article, they put the urge for scientists, in case the struggle stops. He urged the people of science to pay attention to the enormous task of making the repository of knowledge that we had accumulated become more accessible and terrifying. Over the years, our discoveries have expanded human physical capabilities, as well as the capabilities of the mind. The falling hammers, which became the continuation of the blacksmith’s hand, the microscopes that sharpened the eye, and the machines of destruction and detection, are the latest results, but the results signify the end of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, the tools in his hands, which, if well developed, will give a person access and endurance to manage the knowledge accumulated over the centuries. The perfection of such peaceful instruments should be the first goal of our scientists when they are freed from their military work. As Emerson’s famous message in 1837 in The American Scientist, this article by Dr. Bush calls for the establishment of a new relationship between a thinking person and the totality of our knowledge.
How can we think
It was not a war of scientists, it was a war in which everyone took part. Scientists who had buried their old professional disagreements, for the sake of the common cause, shared much and learned a lot together. It was intoxicating to work in effective partnerships. Now, for many, it is coming to an end.
What will scientists do next?
For biologists, and in part for medical scientists, there may be some hesitancy in the fact that their military work dictated to them to abandon the old approaches. Many, of course, will be able to continue their military research in their good old laboratories in peacetime. Their goals remain much the same.
These are physicists, those who were most cruelly strayed from their paths, who left academic careers to create strange destructive devices, who had to develop new methods for unforeseen tasks. They did their part of working with the devices that made it possible to defeat the enemy. They worked together with physicists of our allies. They felt the thirst for accomplishments. They were part of a great team. Now that the world has been reached, some ask where they can take on the task.
What could be the continuing benefits from the use of the achievements of science and the new tools that human research has created? First, these tools have strengthened man’s control over the material world. The clothing of a person has improved, his food, his refuge; these tools secured a person, partially freed him from the shackles of the struggle for survival. They gave him advanced knowledge of his own biological processes, so he gained ever-increasing freedom from disease and increased life expectancy. They highlighted the relationship between psychological and physiological functions, thus foreshadowing the best mental health.
Science has accelerated communication between people; made it possible to write down ideas and the ability to manipulate this information, to extract the necessary, thus, knowledge develops and persists throughout the life of the people, not the individual.
This is a growing mountain of research. BUT there is growing evidence that we are plunging into a swamp, due to growing specialization. A researcher freezes in indecision among hundreds of other finds and conclusions that he doesn’t have enough time to realize, much less time to remember than these finds and conclusions exist. However, specialization is becoming increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to build bridges between disciplines is, accordingly, apparent.
Professionally, our methods of transmitting and reviewing research results emerged several generations ago and are completely inadequate to their purpose. If the total time spent on writing scientific papers and reading them could be calculated, the difference between these time values would be amazing. Those who honestly try to keep up with the flow of thought, even in a limited area, while concentrating and continuously reading, will most likely flee in horror, having read the calculations of how much effort from the previous efforts will have to be repeated. Mendel's ideas about the laws of genetics were inaccessible for a whole generation, because his publications did not reach those few people who were able to grasp and develop them; and this kind of catastrophe will undoubtedly happen to us again when something really significant is lost in the stream of irrelevant.
The problem is seen not so much in the fact that we create an excessive number of publications on today's topics, in all their diversity and scope, but in the fact that the publications themselves have gone far beyond our ability to benefit from them. The totality of human experience is increasing at an exorbitant rate, and the ways in which we progress in this maze to the one we need are the same as in the days of sailing ships.
The emergence of a powerful new toolkit - a harbinger of future changes. Photocells able to “see”, advanced photography techniques, with which you can take pictures of what’s visible and what’s not, thermoelectronic tubes that can control significant energies with less effort than a mosquito on the flap of a wing, cathode-ray tubes, reproducing an image with such a frequency that in comparison with it a microsecond is a long time, relay circuits that can manage complex sequences of actions more reliably than any person and a thousand times faster - an abundance of technical solutions, helping transform scientific records.
Two centuries ago, Leibniz came up with a counting machine, which has most of the mandatory attributes of existing devices with a keyboard, but is not yet embodied in reality. The economic aspect of the situation plays against it: the efforts that go on developing such a machine, until the machine goes into mass use, exceed the efforts that will be saved thanks to it, as long as we can do with a pen and paper. Moreover, frequent failures of such machines will be inevitable, so that we cannot rely on them; at the moment, and for a long time to come, complexity and unreliability are synonymous.
Babbage, even with incredibly generous support for his time, could not build his great arithmetic machine. His idea sounded convincing, but the creation and maintenance in those days were very heavy. If Pharaoh had all the necessary blueprints for building a car, and even if he knew perfectly well what he was doing, the resources of the whole Egyptian kingdom would have been needed to make all these hundreds of parts for one car, and such a car would surely break in its first trip before the pyramids.
Machines with interchangeable parts can now be built with significant savings in effort. In spite of its high complexity, they work very reliably. Evidence of this: typewriter, movie camera, car. Electrical contacts no longer put sticks in our wheels as soon as they became clear.
Let me remind you about automated telephone exchanges, in which there are hundreds of thousands of such contacts and they are still reliable. Weaves of metal enclosed in a thin glass container, wire heated to a dazzling shine in a thermo-cathode lamp from the radio, are hundreds of millions of such devices, divided into groups, included in connectors and it all works! The finest elements, the creation of which required an incredible accuracy of work, and on which the best masters of the guild would work for months, are now made for thirty cents. The world has entered an era of cheap and complex, fault-tolerant devices; and something will certainly come next.
The record, in order to be useful for science, must continue uninterruptedly, it must be stored, and above all this, it must be possible to access it. At the moment, we traditionally record with the help of letters and photographs, followed by printing; In addition, we record on film, on plates and on magnetic wire. Even if new ways are not added, the existing ones are undoubtedly in the process of modification and development.
Indeed, progress in photography is not going to stop. Faster materials and lenses, more automated cameras, fine-grained, sensitive formulations that allow the development of the mini-camera idea are inevitable. Let me predict the logical, if not inevitable, continuation of this trend. The future amateur photographer wears a knob on his forehead, slightly larger than a walnut. This device captures images of three square millimeters, which can then be projected or enlarged, which, after all, exceeds our existing capabilities only 10 times. Universal focus lenses, at any distance the naked eye is capable of, simply due to the short focal length. The nut has a built-in photocell, the same is in at least one automatic camera right now and allows you to automatically adjust the exposure in a wide range of illumination. The film in the nut is enough for hundreds of frames and the spring that moves the shutter and rolls the film starts up only once when we insert the cassette. This device produces full-color photos. This device may well be stereoscopic and can be recorded using glass eyes spaced apart, since striking advances in stereoscopic technology are already on the way.
The cord that pulls the shutter can go down the sleeve so that the person can easily use it. Short press and the picture is ready. On ordinary glasses there is a square of thin lines, almost at the upper edge of the lenses, outside the usual viewing angle, where we do not notice these lines. When we see an object through this square, the lines indicate the boundaries of the future image. When a scientist of the future, in a laboratory or a field, sees something worth being captured, it is enough for him to pull the shutter: he will do all the work, silently. Sounds like a fantasy? The only fantastic thing about this is the idea to display all the resulting photos.
Will a dry photo appear? It already exists in two forms. When Brady took his photos of the Civil War, the photographic plate should have been wet all the time. Now the film should be wet only during the development. In the future, it may not be necessary to wet it at all. For a long time there existed a film with splashes of diazotized dye, which is a type of photo without development, so the technology of dry photography is already here, since the cameras came into use. Exposure with ammonia gas destroys the unexposed dye, and the photo can be taken out and checked. The process at the moment is slow, but it can be accelerated, and there are no particular difficulties in this, such as those that are currently occupied by photography researchers.
Another process is also being used, also slow and awkward. For fifty years, paper has been used, which darkens where electrical contact touches it, due to the chemical reaction produced by the iodine compound included in the paper. This technology can be used to write, with the help of the pointer, which leaves a trail. The electrical potential of the pointer may change, making the line lighter or darker.
This scheme is now used in facsimile. The pointer draws a set of closely spaced lines through all the paper, one on top of the other. While the pointer is moving, its electric potential varies, depending on the alternating current coming from the remote station, where the photocell scans the image. At each segment, the line is as dark as the point on the image that the photocell scans. When the entire image is transferred, the replica will appear in the output window.
The image will be read by the photocell as well, line by line, as photographed earlier. This entire device is a camera with an attached device that allows you to transfer an image, which allows you to print it remotely. Also, it will give another way to dry photos, in which the photo will be ready at the same time as it was taken.
You need to be a brave person to argue that this process will always remain awkward, slow and defective. Television equipment today transmits sixteen reliably good images per second, and in fact there are only two fundamental differences in its device from the process described above. First, the recording is made by a beam of moving electrons, instead of a pointer, for the reason that the electrons move faster. Secondly, the matter is in the screen, which starts to glow instantly when an electron hits it, unlike film or paper, which, moreover, change forever. This speed is necessary in television, as the image moves.
Using a chemically impregnated film instead of a luminous screen, the device will be able to transfer one image instead of a series, and a high-speed camera will allow you to get a dry photo.
("It was a time when the screen was taken."
Impregnated film should act much faster (needs to be far faster in action) than existing copies, but this is quite achievable. A more serious drawback in this scheme is that the film will need to be placed in a vacuum chamber, because the electron beam behaves normally only in a rarefied medium. This difficulty can be avoided by forcing the electron beam to move on one side of the partition, and the film is pressed against the other side of the partition under pressure, if such a partition allows electrons to pass perpendicularly through the surface without dispersing the beam. Such partitions, in rough form, can undoubtedly be made, and are unlikely to be able to stop the development of the idea as a whole.
Micrographs, like dry photos, have a great future. The basic idea is to reduce the size of a record and read it through a projection, instead of reading it directly, and this idea opens up too many possibilities to be ignored. The combination of optical projection and size reduction is already producing results such as scientific microfilms, and the potential of this technology is extremely appealing. At the moment, microfilm, reduced by 20 times, gives the same clear image as the material of the original size. The possibilities are limited by the graininess of the film, the perfection of the optical system, and the efficiency of the light receivers used. All this is rapidly developing.
Imagine a hundredfold decrease in the future. Imagine a film as thick as paper, of course, and a thinner film can be used. Even if these conditions are met, we will get a ten thousandth difference in size between the original book and the microfilm recorded. The British Encyclopedia fits in a matchbox, a library with millions of volumes on half the desktop. All that humanity has recorded since it learned to write: all magazines, newspapers, books, treatises, advertising booklets, correspondence, has a volume comparable to a billion books, and all this volume, properly assembled and compressed, will easily fit in a mobile van. Simple compression, of course, is not enough; It is required not only to create and keep a record, but also to address it. We will consider this aspect later. Even a great modern library is not fully available for research, you have to pinch a little bit.
Compression is important when it comes to cost. The material for the microfilm with the British Encyclopedia will cost 5 cents (nickel - nickel), and can be sent by mail per cent. How much does a million copies cost? On the printing of a newspaper sheet takes a small part of the cent. All British Encyclopedia material in microfilm will fit on a sheet of eight and a half by eleven inches. As soon as this becomes possible, with the help of photographic technologies of the future, the cost price of a copy in good quality will be less than a cent. Preparing the original for copying? This brings us to the discussion of the next aspect.
To record, we take a pen or knock on the typewriter keys. Then comes the turn of the correction and cleansing of the text, entailing an intricate process of typographical typing, printing and distribution of finished products. What if we assume that in the future the writer will be spared the need to write or print, directly slandering text to write? He comes in very indirectly, slandering the shorthand painter or wax cylinder; but all the elements necessary for him to directly record the voice in the form of a printed text already exist. All he needs to do is use the capabilities of existing mechanisms and change his language.
At the last World Show, the Voder machine was presented. The girl pressed the keys and the car reproduced quite recognizable speech. No human speech was introduced into the procedure, at any stage, the keys simply combined the vibrations produced by the electric current, which were then output to the loudspeaker. In Bell's lab there is an alteration of this machine, called the Vocoder. The loudspeaker is replaced by a microphone that perceives sound. You speak into it, and certain keys move. This may be one of the elements of the above system.
We find another element in the stenotypical machine (stenotype, a typewriter that prints in whole words), a confusing device that is usually found at public events. The girl is bored knocking on her keys, an annoying gaze drills down the hall and the lecturer. From this typewriter a printed strip appeared, recording in phonetically simplified language what the speaker was saying. Later this strip is reprinted in ordinary speech, since it itself is understandable only to initiates. Combine these two elements, we get a machine that will print what we say.
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To be continued
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I will try to get to the primary sources of IT-technologies, to understand how they thought and what concepts were in the minds of the pioneers, what they dreamed about, how they saw the world of the future. Why did you think “computer”, “network”, “hypertext”, “intelligence amplifiers”, “collective problem solving system”, what meaning did they put into these concepts, what tools they wanted to achieve a result.
I hope that these materials will serve as an inspiration for those who are wondering how to go “from Zero to Unit” (to create something that had never happened before). I would like IT and “programming” to stop being just “coding for the sake of dough”, and recall that they were conceived as a lever to change the
0 March. Seymour papert
March 1. Xerox alto
March 2, "Call Jake." NIC and RFC history
March 3, Grace "Grandma COBOL" Hopper
March 4 Margaret Hamilton: "Guys, I'll send you to the moon"
March 5, Hedy Lamarr. And in the movie naked to play and torpedo the bullet into the enemy
March 7 Gorgeous Six: girls who had a thermonuclear explosion calculated
March 8, "Video Games, I'm your father!"
March 9th Happy Birthday to Jeff Raskin
March 14 Joseph "Lick" Liclider: "Intergalactic computer network" and "Symbiosis of man and computer"
March 15 Vanivar Bush: “How We Can Think” (As We May Think)
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/279241/
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