Portable Informaticm — Is the Dream Becoming a Reality?

Number16 In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an article in the A t[antic Mon(h/y which has become a classic in information science. Bush, who helped pioneer computer science, called on American scientists to redirect their war research efforts toward the problems of peace. Encouraged by science's advances in controlling the material environment, Bush was optimistic that the same ingenuity could be applied to the intellectual environment. He even described a device called " Memex " which could aid the individual to access the rapidly expanding record of man's knowledge. In Bush's own words Memex would be " a device in which an individual stores his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory. " 1 In the earliest days of the international documentation movement the symbol for the solution to total access was microfilm. In those days, when on-line computing was not even dreamed of, it was natural that Memex should be thought of as a microfilm storage device. But Memex came to stand for more than just a device. Memex and the idea of the world brain expressed the ideal of universal bibliographic control, which I discussed in my paper " World Brain or Memex? " z Memex inspired many of us in those early days. When I worked with Emik Avakian on the development of the Automatic Microfilm Information Selector (AMFIS), we acknowledged the inspira-April 21, 1980 tion of Memex in our paper.J AMFIS was designed around microfilm, but the microfilm was stored in an unusual and innovative way. Instead of traditional microfilm reels, the film was arranged in strips and stored on large scrolls which could be accessed simultaneously in two tlmensions. It is not important to expound on the mechanical details of AMFIS. A practical few-cost device was never produced. However, I believe a modern version of it was built for a government agency in Europe. There is a vast literature on so-called microfilm. The term microfilm is really a misnomer. There is nothing micro about the film itself, whether 35mm, 16mm, or 8mm in width. What is micro is the image of the document on the film. Typically, the image of a one page document is stored in an area that requires less than 1/500 of the original area. For example, using a reduction ratio of …