Information Technology Reference
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system. Several files could be displayed at a time, and a simple code
would store linked or related files. Though Bush's concept of the
Memex system was in terms of the photo-mechanical technologies
then available, he anticipated much of the technology that would
later be realized in multimedia and graphical computing. As well as
the above ideas, Bush also encompassed data compression, infor-
mation exchange with other users and voice recognition. Most
importantly Bush introduced the notion of 'associative indexing',
enabling the user to make trails through the mass of information
and record those trails, which can be followed and annotated by
other users. It is this capacity in particular that would later come to
characterize the areas known as hypermedia and multimedia. Bush's
ideas were a crucial influence on a generation of computer scientists
and thinkers, pre-eminent among them Engelbart, Theodor (Ted)
Nelson and Alan Kay. Engelbart had read 'As We May Think' while
serving in the
Army as a radar technician. This, along with his
army experience, enabled him to come to a radical understanding
of the potential of computers. After the War he was employed as
an electrical engineer at Stanford Research Institute, where ARPA
funding enabled him to found his Augmentation Research Center
(ARC) (illus.
us
). ARC was dedicated to researching how computers
might be used to augment human intelligence. In its twelve years of
existence ARC developed many, if not most, of the techniques we
now take for granted in computing. These included word process-
ing, cutting and pasting, separate windows, hypertext (where it is
possible to jump from one document to another), multimedia,
outline processing, computer conferencing, and even the mouse.
Perhaps the most well known contribution of ARPA to the devel-
opment of computing is its role in the formation of the Internet,
the set of interconnections between computers that now encom-
passes the world. The idea of establishing such a network had been a
concern of Licklider's for some time, and in his
19
'Man-Computer
Symbiosis' paper he described a system of linked computers.
1960
