The Manual Memex

Abstract

an't you make your book about the future? an editor once asked me. People love to buy books about the future. Her comments were well intended and forced me to rethink what I was doing. I had just completed a manuscript about the founding generation of the computer industry, the people who had joined IBM, Burroughs, General Electric, and the other computer vendors of the 1950s. Her comments were an indirect way of saying I don't think anyone will care about your subject and a direct way of pushing me toward a book that she thought she could sell. As I thought about her comments, trying to avoid taking offense, I realized that I really didn't care much about the events of the 1950s and 1960s either. I was concerned with the events of today and how we would have to navigate among them. However, I was also interested in how our present world was shaped by the legacy of that founding generation, how their values and decisions shaped our landscape, and the way that we navigated across it. Far too often, we accept a very narrow view of our field. We do not see the connections between our work and others, miss the links between seminal ideas, and subscribe to a theory of invention and innovation that simply cannot be true. Ideas do not drip uniquely on individuals, bestowing on them the power of invention and causing them to run through their offices shouting Eureka! Eureka! Ideas bubble through a community, taking different shapes before they settle into a useful form.