How To Be A Pack Rat - Forbes.com: "The MyLifeBits project can trace its origins to the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, which featured an article by Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, the U.S. Government's technology think tank. In the essay, entitled 'As We May Think,' Bush made the argument that scientists needed to concentrate on making knowledge more accessible, and described some of the methods and devices we might use to do so. One piece of hardware, a mechanized private file library called a 'memex,' has become a model for the MyLifeBits team.
Bush's essay was written more than 15 years before scientists patented the first integrated circuits, so the device he envisioned stored content on 'improved microfilm' and allowed for direct data entry using a dry photography system. Users trying to find a particular file would have to press levers to scroll through their data page by page.
Sixty years later, the resemblance between a memex and a personal computer is clear. So Microsoft has set out to create the infrastructure which would allow PCs to scan and store all of our data and make it easily retrievable."
What Gordon Bell has been up to lately...
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