Turning Your Life into Bits, Indexed
From: Los Angeles Times - 07/11/2005 - P. A19
By: Michael Hiltzik

Vannevar Bush's vision of Memex, an electronic archive of a person's entire
life, is becoming a reality some 60 years after the science advisor penned
his provocative article "As We May Think" in a 1945 issue of the Atlantic
Monthly. Microsoft distinguished engineer Gordon Bell has developed
MyLifeBits, a storage project that he estimates can house the substance of an
entire lifetime, including letters, telephone conversations, home movies, and
photographs. Capitalizing on cheaper data storage and increased digitization,
MyLifeBits, soon to be renamed Memex in an homage to Bush, will be able to
house all this data on a 1 TB hard disk. Bell launched the project when he
received several boxes of his old papers, and set out to digitize all of them
before turning to other memorabilia from his life; in total, Bell found that
his life amounted to 16 GB. Bell and research associate Jim Gemmell devised a
cross-referencing index system that links different formats of data to mirror
the way our mental associations work. As the project has evolved, it now
includes 84,300 emails Bell has sent and received, and 53,400 Web pages he
has visited. Bell and Gemmell have pitched their idea to neuroscientists for
applications such as helping Alzheimer's patients. So far the response has
been muted, though the researchers believe that widespread adoption of the
MyLifeBits concept is inevitable. Gemmell says, "It's like bucking the trend
toward literacy. That reduced our ability to remember things orally, but gave
us the permanency of books."  

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Links:
"As We May Think"
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/works/vbush/
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~jod/texts/vannevar.bush.html

The Eletronic Labyrinth
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0051.html

Memex from Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex

MyLifeBits Project - Microsoft Research
http://www.research.microsoft.com/barc/mediapresence/MyLifeBits.aspx

Foreseeing the Future: The legacy of Vannevar Bush
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/foreseeing_the_future_the_legacy_of_vannevar_bush.php

Electronic Document Retrieval and Vannevar Bush's Memex
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~buckland/goldbush.html