"Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month's efforts could be produced on call. Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.

The difficulty seems to be not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships."

"Consider a future device for individual use which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "MEMEX" will do. A MEMEX is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the MEMEX is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5,000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.

Most of the MEMEX contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct entry. On the top of the MEMEX is a transparent platen. On this are placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sorts of things. When one is in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be photographed onto the next blank space on a section of the MEMEX film, dry photography being employed.

There is, of course, provision for consultation of the record by the usual scheme of indexing. If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions. Frequently used codes are mnemonic, so that he seldom consults his code book; but when he does, a single tap of a key projects it for his use. Moreover, he has supplemental levers. On deflecting one of these levers to the right he runs through the book before him, each page in turn being projected at a speed which just allows a recognizing glance at each. If he deflects it further to the right, he steps through the book ten pages at a time; still further at one hundred pages at a time. Deflection to the left gives him the same control backward.

A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the index. Any given book of his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item in position while he calls up another. He can add marginal notes and comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography, and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him.

All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of present day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the MEMEX. The process of tying two items together is the important thing.

When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined. In each code space appears the code word. Out of view, but also in the code space, is inserted a set of dots for photocell viewing; and on each item these dots by their positions designate the index number of the other item.

Thereafter, at any time when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails.....

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped in the MEMEX and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.

The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected."

"The fig tree is pollinated only by the insect Blastophaga grossorum. The larva of the insect lives in the ovary of the fig tree, and there it gets its food. The tree and the insect are thus heavily interdependent: The tree cannot reproduce without the insect; the insect cannot eat without the tree; together, they constitute not only a viable but a productive and thriving partnership. This cooperative "living together in intimate association, or even close union, of two dissimilar organisms" is called symbiosis.

"Man-computer symbiosis" is a subclass of man-machine systems. There are many man-machine systems. At present, however, there are no man-computer symbioses. The purposes of this paper are to present the concept and, hopefully, to foster the development of man-computer symbiosis by analyzing some problems of interaction between men and computing machines, calling attention to applicable principles of man-machine engineering, and pointing out a few questions to which research answers are needed. The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today."

"Present-day computers are designed primarily to solve preformulated problems.....

However, many problems that can be thought through in advance are very difficult to think through in advance. They would be easier to solve, and they would be solved faster, through an intuitively guided trial-and-error procedure in which the computer cooperates, turning up flaws in the reasoning or revealing unexpected turns in the solution. Other problems simply cannot be formulated without computing-machine aid. Poincare anticipated the frustration of an important group of would-be computer users when he said, "The question is not ‘What is the answer?' The question is ‘What is the question?'" One of the main aims of man-computer symbiosis is to bring the computing machine effectively into the formulative parts of technical problems.

The other main aim is closely related. It is to bring computing machines effectively into processes of thinking that must go on in "real time," time that moves too fast to permit using computers in conventional ways. Imagine trying, for example, to direct a battle with the aid of a computer on such a schedule as this. You formulate your problem today. Tomorrow you spend with a programmer. Next week the computer devotes 5 minutes to assembling your program and 47 seconds to calculating the answer to your problem. You get a sheet of paper 20 feet long, full of numbers that, instead of providing a final solution, only suggest a tactic that should be explored by simulation. Obviously, the battle would be over before the second step in it planning was begun. To think in interaction with a computer in the same way that you think with a colleague whose competence supplements your own will require much tighter coupling between man and machine than is suggested by the example and than is possible today."

"..... In the spring and summer of 1957, therefore, I tried to keep track of what one moderately technical person actually did during the hours he regarded as devoted to work. Although I was aware of the inadequacy of the sampling, I served as my own subject.

It soon became apparent that the main thing I did was to keep records.....

About 85 per cent of my "thinking" time was spent getting into a position to think, to make a decision, to learn something I needed to know. Much more time went into finding or obtaining information than into digesting it. Hours went into the plotting of graphs and other hours into instructing an assistant how to plot. When the graphs were finished, the relations were obvious at once, but the plotting had to be done in order to make them so. At one point, it was necessary to compare six experimental determinations of a function relating speech intelligibility to speech-to-noise ratio. No two experimenters had used the same definition or measure of speech-to-noise ratio. Several hours of calculating were required to get the data into comparable form. When they were in comparable form, it took only a few seconds to determine what I needed to know.

Throughout the period I examined, in short, my "thinking" time was devoted mainly to activities that were essentially clerical or mechanical: searching, calculating, plotting, transforming, determining the logical or dynamic consequences of a set of assumptions or hypotheses, preparing the way for a decision or an insight. Moreover, my choices of what to attempt and what not to attempt were determined to an embarrassingly great extent by considerations of clerical feasibility, not intellectual capability.

The main suggestion conveyed by the findings just described is that the operations that fill most of the time allegedly devoted to technical thinking are operations that can be performed more effectively by machines than by men. Severe problems are posed by the fact that these operations have to be performed upon diverse variables and in unforeseen and continually changing sequences. If those problems can be solved in such a way as to create a symbiotic relation between a man and a fast information-retrieval and data-processing machine, however, it seems evident that the cooperative interaction would greatly improve the thinking process."

"By "augmenting man's intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: the comprehension can be gained more quickly; that better comprehension can be gained; that a useful degree of comprehension can be gained where previously the situation was too complex; that solutions can be produced more quickly; that better solutions can be produced; that solutions can be found where previously the human could find none. And by "complex situations" we include the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists, life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers — whether the problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human "feel for a situation" usefully coexist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and highly-powered electronic aids.....

Our culture has evolved means for us to organize and utilize our basic capabilities so that we can comprehend truly complex situations and accomplish the processes of devising and implementing problem solutions. The ways in which human capabilities are thus extended are here called augmentation means, and we define four basic classes of them:

The system we wish to improve can thus be visualized as comprising a trained human being together with his artifacts, language, and methodology....."

"It is extremely important to note the multiple levels of synergism at work here:

(a) The synergistic effect of integrating many tools into one coherent workshop makes each tool considerably more valuable than if it were used alone — for instance, the value of teleconferencing is very much greater when the participants are already doing a large proportion of their everyday work on line, so that any of the working material is available for selective citing and accessing, and when the users are already at home with the basic techniques of preparing and studying on-line material and of organizing and finding related passages.

(b) ... the synergistic effect of integrating many augmented individuals into one coherent community makes each element of augmentation considerably more valuable than if it were applied just to support its one individual — this is derived from the collaborative communication capabilities as applied through extended organizational methods to integrate the augmented capabilities of individuals into augmented teams and communities.

And finally, for any application of significant power — of which augmentation of an engineering project would be a good example — the adaptability and evolutionary flexibility of the computer-communication system is extremely important. The working methods of individuals will shift markedly as they settle into use of a comprehensive workshop, and with these new methods and skills will come payoff potential for changes and additions to their workshops — a cycle that will be significantly active for many years to come. A similar cycle will be even more dramatically evident at the organizational level."

"Systems of paper have grave limitations for either organizing or presenting ideas. A book is never perfectly suited to the reader; one reader is bored, another confused by the same pages. No system of paper — book or programmed text — can adapt very far to the interests or needs of a particular reader or student.

However, with the computer-driven display and mass memory, it has been possible to create a new, readable medium, for education and enjoyment, that will let the reader find his level, suit his taste, and find the parts that take on special meaning for him, as instruction or entertainment.

Let me introduce the word hypertext to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper. It may contain summaries, or maps of its contents and their interrelations; it may contain annotations, additions and footnotes from scholars who have examined it. Let me suggest that such an object and system, properly designed and administered, could have great potential for education, increasing the student's range of choices, his sense of freedom, his motivation, and his intellectual grasp. Such a system could grow indefinitely, gradually including more and more of the world's written knowledge....."

"The myth of technical determinism seems to hold captive both the public and the computer priesthood. Indeed, the myth is believed both by people who love, and by people who hate, computers. This myth, never questioned because never stated, holds that whatever is to come in the computer field is somehow preordained by technical necessity or some form of scientific correctness. This is cybercrud.

Computers do what people want them to do, at best. Figuring out what we should want, in full contemplation of the outspread possibilities, is a task that needs us all, laymen no less. There is something right about the public backlash against computers: things don't have to be this way, with our bank balances unavailable from computers, the immense serial numbers of our drivers' licenses generated by computers, the unstaunchable rivers of junk mail sent to us by computers. And it is the duty of the computer-man to help demythologize, to help the intelligent layman understand the specifics of systems he must deal with, and to help the public explore the question, what do we want?.....

I can now state what I believe to be the central problem of screenworld design, and indeed of design of man-machine anything — that is, psychic architecture.

By the psychic architecture of a system, I mean the mental conceptions and space structures among which the user moves: their arrangements and their qualities, especially clarity, integration and meshing, power, utility and lack of clutter.

It should be noted that these notions are much like those by which we judge regular architecture, and indeed the relationship would seem very close. An architectural grand design — say, of a capitol building — embraces the fundamental concepts a user will have to know to get around: main places, corridor arrangement (visualization and symmetries), access structure. These concepts are the very same in a screenworld or other complex man-made virtual structure: main places, corridors or transition rules (and their visualization and symmetries), access structure. It is a virtual space much like a building (though not confined to three "normally" connected dimensions), and susceptible to the same modes of spatial understanding, kinds of possible movement within, and potential appreciation and criticism.....

The psychic engineering of fantic fields — adult's hyperspaces of word and picture, child's gardens of verses — is our new frontier. We must look not to Asimovian robotics and the automated schoolmarm and librarian, but to the penny arcade and the bicycle, the clever diagram and the movie effect, to furnish this new realm.

""Devices" which variously store, retrieve, or manipulate information in the form of messages embedded in a medium have been in existence for thousands of years. People use them to communicate ideas and feelings both to others and back to themselves. Although thinking goes on in one's head, external media serve to materialize thoughts and, through feedback, to augment the actual paths the thinking follows. Methods discovered in one medium provide metaphors which contribute new ways to think about notions in other media.

For most of recorded history, the interactions of humans with their media have been primarily nonconversational and passive in the sense that marks on paper, paint on walls, even "motion" pictures and television, do not change in response to the viewer's wishes. A mathematical formulation — which may symbolize the essence of an entire universe — once put down on paper, remains static and requires the reader to expand its possibilities.

Every message is, in one sense or another, a simulation of some idea. It may be representational or abstract. The essence of a medium is very much dependent on the way messages are embedded, changed, and viewed. Although digital computers were originally designed to do arithmetic computation, the ability to simulate the details of any descriptive model means that the computer, viewed as a medium itself, can be all other media if the embedding and viewing methods are sufficiently well provided. Moreover, this new "metamedium" is active — it can respond to queries and experiments — so that the messages may involve the learner in a two-way conversation. This property has never been available before except through the medium of an individual teacher. We think the implications are vast and compelling.

A dynamic medium for creative thought: the Dynabook. Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. Suppose it had enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference materials, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change.

We envision a device as small and portable as possible which could both take in and give out information in quantities approaching that of human sensory systems. Visual output should be, at the least, of higher quality than what can be obtained from newsprint. Audio output should adhere to similar high-fidelity standards.

There should be no discernible pause between cause and effect. One of the metaphors we used when designing such a system was that of a musical instrument, such as a flute, which is owned by its user and responds instantly and consistently to its owner's wishes. Imagine the absurdity of a one-second delay between blowing a note and hearing it!

These "civilized" desires for flexibility, resolution, and response lead to the conclusion that a user of a dynamic personal medium needs several hundred times as much power as the average adult now typically enjoys from timeshared computing. This means that we should either build a new resource several hundred times the capacity of current machines and share it (very difficult and expensive), or we should investigate the possibility of giving each person his own powerful machine. We chose the second approach."

"Computer-aided design cannot occur without machine intelligence — and would be dangerous without it. In our area, however, most people have serious misgivings about the feasibility and more importantly, the desirability of attributing the actions of a machine to intelligent behavior. These people generally distrust the concept of machines that approach (and thus why not pass?) our own human intelligence. In our culture an intelligent machine is immediately assumed to be a bad machine. As soon as intelligence is ascribed to the artificial, some people believe that the artifact will become evil and strip us of our humanistic values. Or, like the great gazelle and the water buffalo, we will be placed on reserves to be pampered by a ruling class of automata.

Why ask a machine to learn, to understand, to associate courses with goals, to be self-improving, to be ethical — in short, to be intelligent?

The answer is the underlying postulate of an architecture machine. A design machine must have an artificial intelligence because any design procedure, set of rules, or truism is tenuous, if not subversive, when used out of context or regardless of context. It follows that a mechanism must recognize and understand the context before carrying out an operation. Therefore, a machine must be able to discern changes in meaning brought about by changes in context, hence, be intelligent. And to do this, it must have a sophisticated set of sensors, effectors, and processors to view the real world directly and indirectly."

"..... Each [a designer and a machine] should track the other's design maneuvers, evoking a rhetoric that cannot be anticipated. "What was mere noise and disorder or distraction before, becomes pattern and sense; information has been metabolized out of noise" (Brodey and Lindgren, 1967). The event is circular inasmuch as the designer-machine unity provokes a dialogue and the dialogue promotes a stronger designer-machine unity. This progressively intimate association of the two dissimilar species is the symbiosis. It evolves through mutual training, in this case, through the dialogue.

Such man-machine dialogue has no historical precedent. The present antagonistic mismatch between man and machine, however, has generated a great deal of preoccupation for it. In less than a decade the term "man-machine communication" has passed from concept to cliché to platitude. Nevertheless, the theory is important and straightforward: in order to have a cooperative interaction between a designer of a certain expertise and a machine of some scholarship, the two must be congenial and must share the labor of establishing a common language. A designer, when addressing a machine, must not be forced to resort to machine-oriented codes. And in spite of computational efficiency, a paradigm for fruitful conversations must be machines that can speak and respond to a natural language.

With direct, fluid, and natural man-machine discourse, two former barriers between architects and computing machines would be removed. First, the designers, using computer-aided design hardware, would not have to be specialists. With natural communication, the "this is what I want to do" and "can you do it" gap could be bridged. The design task would no longer be described to a "knobs and dials" person to be executed in his secret vernacular. Instead, with simple negotiations, the job would be formulated and executed in the designer's own idiom. As a result, a vibrant stream of ideas could be directly channeled from the designer to the machine and back.

The second instruction overcome by such close communion is the potential for reevaluating the procedures themselves. In a direct dialogue the designer can exercise his proverbial capriciousness. At first a designer may have only a meager understanding of his specific problem and thus require machine tolerance and compatibility in his search for the consistency among criteria and form and method, between intent and purpose. The progression from visceral to intellectual can be articulated in subsequent provisional statements of detail and moment-to-moment reevaluations of the methods themselves.

But, the tete-à-tete must be even more direct and fluid; it is gestures, smiles, and frowns that turn a conversation into a dialogue. "Most Americans are only dimly aware of this silent language even though they use it everyday. They are not conscious of the elaborate patterning of behavior which prescribes our handling of time, our spatial relationships, our attitudes towards work, play, and learning" (Hall, 1959). In an intimate human-to-human dialogue, hand-waving often carries as much meaning as text. Manner carries cultural information: the Arabs use their noses, the Japanese nod their heads. Customarily, in man-machine communication studies, such silent languages are ignored and frequently are referred to as "noise." But such silent languages are not noise; a dialogue is composed of "whole body involvement — with hands, eyes, mouth, facial expressions — using many channels simultaneously, but rhythmized into a harmoniously simple exchange" (Brodey and Lindgren, 1968).

Imagine a machine that can follow your design methodology and at the same time discern and assimilate your conversational idiosyncrasies. This same machine, after observing your behavior, could build a predictive model of your conversational performance. Such a machine could then reinforce the dialogue by using the predictive model to respond to you in a manner that is in rhythm with your personal behavior and conversational idiosyncrasies.

What this means is the dialogue we are proposing would be so personal that you would not be able to use someone else's machine, and he would not understand yours. In fact, neither machine would be able to talk directly to the other. The dialogue would be so intimate — even exclusive — that only mutual persuasion and compromise would bring about ideas, ideas unrealizable by either conversant alone. No doubt, in such a symbiosis it would not be solely the human designer who would decide when the machine is relevant."