[btilly]

Seeing PageRank discussed reminds me of a piece of fun trivia. The idea for PageRank came out of the success of the Science Citation Index, which ranks papers according to how often they have been cited. The idea of trying to study the structure of citations in academia came out of people who were inspired by a 1948 essay, As We May Think.

But that essay's main topic was an imagined technology called memex, to be implemented with an automated indexing system and microfilm. This technology is the first description of hypertext, which inspired multiple technologies. The second successful consumer application that I'm aware of that used hypertext was the web. (The first was HyperCard from Apple.)

Thus Google started as the application of one set of techniques inspired by As We May Think to a technology that was also inspired by As We May Think.

See http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma... for the essay itself. Do keep in mind that it was written one year after the transistor was invented, but the author already had 2 decades of experience with computing.

[killerbat00]

Vannevar Bush's ideas about information organization and consumption in the future were eerily accurate. Reading about the history of Memex and the roots of the Information Architecture field in general is something I highly recommend for anyone interested in Information Science, etc.

[JumpCrisscross]

Recommended book(s)?

[killerbat00]

You can read Bush's original paper, As We May Think (where he presents the Memex) here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma...

Here is a database of his papers: http://findingaids.loc.gov/db/search/xq/searchMfer02.xq?_id=...

[andrewcooke]

bush is mentioned in mirowski's "machine dreams", and it's not very complementary. that book is one of my favourites, but it's a post-modern, opinionated, soft-science (he's a history / philosophy / economics guy) take on post-war economics (and a whole pile of surrounding subjects). i suspect most people will hate the book as much as i love it, but you might be interested (perhaps you can find a library copy to check out....)

[pav3l]

Someone just started a discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4577865

[pdog]

Previous discussion (two years ago, with comments):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1565764