![the godfather pc can the godfather pc can](https://www.hookedgamers.com/images/153/the_godfather/screenshot_pc_the_godfather013.jpg)
"Bush's great insight was realizing that there's more value in the connections between data than in the data itself," Kahle says. Another Bushian feature to come: archived annotations or reaction comments made by earlier travelers on a particular trail. The company's centerpiece is a navigation service that provides information about where a user is, and might go, on the Web, as well as prepackaged paths through selected subjects. "What we're doing is right down Bush's line," says founder Brewster Kahle. They can degenerate into a slush pile, which is not what Bush wanted." Lloyd is tight-lipped about his work toward a solution, but says flatly, "I'm building a memex, the holy grail."Īlexa Internet, a San Francisco company, is similarly engaged. But then the problem is managing your bookmarks. "There are Web tools that manage bookmarks, that help you find your place," Lloyd says. in Providence, Rhode Island, engineer Gregory Lloyd is designing better ways to record a user's associations between different Web sites. Some ambitious efforts to tame the Web's chaos are avowedly inspired by Bush. Bush knew a computer connected to a global information network could solve a problem that, in 1945, barely existed yet.
![the godfather pc can the godfather pc can](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kd-EeynPu44/maxresdefault.jpg)
"We are drowning in information," declared Interactions, the journal of the Association for Computing Machinery, in a tribute to Bush last year, "while precious little is in drinkable form. Even the search engines on the Web do everything by brute force, rather than retrieving personalized links laid down by the user, which is why you get so much junk."įinding useful information amid the junk is the great technical problem of the moment. Bush talked about the amplification of the human mind. Its retrieval systems, for instance, are incredibly primitive. So you can't just say, 'Been there, done that.'" Compared to Bush's ideal, van Dam points out, "the Web is embryonic. "And the core of that vision hasn't been realized yet.
![the godfather pc can the godfather pc can](https://nkiri.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/godfather-of-harlem-s02-poster.jpg)
"Bush's vision is extremely relevant," says Andries van Dam, a professor of computer science at Brown University. And the rise of the Internet cemented Bush's reputation as a prophet of cyberculture, with some enthusiasts even arguing that "As We May Think" laid the intellectual seeds for the World Wide Web. Ted Nelson, who popularized the notion of hypertext, thanked Bush for inspiration.
The godfather pc can't enter name software#
Software designers took off on Bush's ideas of associative trails. The birth of the PC in the mid-1970s brought Bush renewed attention. These personal associations, or "trails," could be shared among people, Bush thought, even passed down from parent to child, giving their creators a measure of immortality. Bearing a striking resemblance to the personal computer, the memex promised the added benefit of letting its owner link together disparate pieces of information, thus automating a process of retrieving associated ideas and data. Bush envisioned it as a universal library, relying on microfilm to store vast amounts of text, crammed onto a desktop. "As We May Think" describes a device - Bush called it a "memex" - that was meant to tame the then-novel problem of information overload by enhancing human memory (hence its name). He conceived the National Science Foundation and the Advanced Research Projects Agency, helping guarantee US supremacy in cutting-edge technologies by judiciously channeling federal funds to new frontiers. During the early 1940s, at the behest of then President Roosevelt, he led the drive to build the first atomic bomb, organizing the Manhattan Project and setting the stage for every US Big Science project from the H-bomb to the Moon race and Star Wars. The device, which foreshadowed both the PC and the Web, was just one of Bush's many seminal contributions. When those contraptions were supplanted by digital ones beginning in the early 1940s, he envisioned a revolutionary personal information machine that would store and retrieve not just all essential human knowledge, but its owner's specific memories.
![the godfather pc can the godfather pc can](https://imazing.com/img/visual/screenshots/pc/homescreen.jpg)
In the 1930s, as a professor of electrical engineering at MIT, he designed what were then the world's most powerful computers: room-sized mechanical devices that took days just to ready for a new problem.