A list of notable magazine articles for techies would be remiss to omit Vannevar Bush's 1945 "As We May Think" for The Atlantic Monthly[1], also known as the "memex" essay. (The article is present in the extended list[2].) The Wikipedia entry[3] does a reasonable summary and exposition.
This is a poignant and prescient article, calling (in the waning days of WWII) for scientists to find meaningful peaceful objectives "worthy of their best." In the essay, Bush anticipates such inventions as:
* Personal computers:
"The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more."
* Hypertext / the Web:
"...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."
* Wikipedia:
"Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified."
* Speech recognition:
"Combine these two elements, let the Vocoder run the stenotype, and the result is a machine which types when talked to."
* Google Glass:
"The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut... As the scientist of the future moves about the laboratory or the field, every time he looks at something worthy of the record, he trips the shutter and in it goes."
* Search / information retrieval:
"There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene."
It's a remarkable article, not just for the "gee! I recognize that!" sensation, but also because we have in many ways still failed to deliver on the promise. Despite personal wikis / DEVONthink / Evernote and friends, I don't think we've really nailed the memex.
In the same vein is J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor's "The Computer as a Communication Device" from 1968 [1]:
"future version of this system will make it possible for each participant, on his own TV screen, to thumb through the speaker’s files as the speaker talks—and thus check out incidental questions without interrupting the presentation for substantiation."
"You will not send a letter or a telegram; you will simply identify the people whose files should be linked to yours and the parts to which they should be linked-and perhaps specify a coefficient of urgency. You will seldom make a telephone call; you will ask the network to link your consoles
together"
"When people do their informational work 'at the console' and 'through the network,' telecommunication will be as natural an extension of individual work as face-to-face communication is now. The impact of that fact, and of the marked facilitation of the communicative process, will be very great—both on the individual and on society"
This is a poignant and prescient article, calling (in the waning days of WWII) for scientists to find meaningful peaceful objectives "worthy of their best." In the essay, Bush anticipates such inventions as:
* Personal computers:
"The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more."
* Hypertext / the Web:
"...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."
* Wikipedia:
"Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified."
* Speech recognition:
"Combine these two elements, let the Vocoder run the stenotype, and the result is a machine which types when talked to."
* Google Glass:
"The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut... As the scientist of the future moves about the laboratory or the field, every time he looks at something worthy of the record, he trips the shutter and in it goes."
* Search / information retrieval:
"There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene."
It's a remarkable article, not just for the "gee! I recognize that!" sensation, but also because we have in many ways still failed to deliver on the promise. Despite personal wikis / DEVONthink / Evernote and friends, I don't think we've really nailed the memex.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma...
[2] http://kk.org/cooltools/1960s-and-earli
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think