As we may think

After reading the first few pages of this article I realized that it had obviously been written many years ago. My curiosity prompted me to do a search for it online and I found out that it had first been published in 1945. This information alone made the article that much more interesting to me. One of my favorite sections, and the part that stuck with me the most, was the concluding paragraphs of section three. Its almost weird how the author of this piece, Vannevar Bush, more or less predicted the future of some of the technology that we now have today. In his paper he says, “The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and they will perform at 100 times present speeds or more.”, which is almost a perfect description of a computer. To build upon this observation he also says, (about the previous mentioned device) “they will be far more versatile than present commercial machines (ex. Laptops/notebooks) ; “They will be controlled by a control card…” (ex. Memory card) ; “they will select their own data and manipulate it in accordance with the instructions thus inserted, they will perform complex arithmetical computations at exceedingly high speeds, and they will record results in such for as to be readily available for distribution or for later further manipulation”, (ex. programming) ; as well as, “such machines will have enormous appetites (ex. computers with large memory capabilities). This section really made me ponder the question weather Bush, and other thinkers/writers like him were exceedingly capable of understanding the process of technological evolution, or if perhaps because of people like them, and the fact that they made record of their ideas through writing, inventors were eventually able to bring their “ideas” of the future to life. It is my opinion that technological advances could not exist with out first exploring the ideas of people just like Bush.