Vannevar Bush, pioneer of the idea of the "memex" (one of those hypothetical proto-internet deals,) well first of all he saw it as taking place all on microfilm which is a-mah-zing, but, without having hyperlink per se technology yet something very similar (basing the memex's operations, as the name implies, on the way that the human brain recalls information,) likewise saw the operation of the memex as being capable of supporting link "trails," your wiki walk of all the articles you opened up in new tabs which you save in sequence and can share with other people. (Seriously. He predicted this in 1945. 1945.)
So I find it only fitting that, in the spirit of "blogging" in its original meaning and Mr Bush's proposal for the patterns mass information storage/retrieval take, I should take you on a journey through 1940s high technology that's still pretty darn impressive even today.
Vannevar Bush wrote the essay "As We May Think" for the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic, which hey look at that is a publication still around today which has a website that features all of its articles, so I wonder you can bet that they've got it, right here, definitely recommended reading. Crazy stuff, reading that on the internet, not even specially hosted or nuttin', just, another Atlantic article, not even one that particularly old seeing as how it'd been around almost a hundred years by that point already (November 1857. I looked it up.)
In the article, anyway, Mr Bush references technology known as Voder (an early speech synthesizer) and Vocoder (its sister, the speech... coder,) using them as examples of how Memex could have speech-recognition, voice-control technology. Did such a thing really exist? How had I not heard of it till now? I can't answer the second question, but looking into it: yes, Voder and Vocoder are/were real. Feast your eye'n, on probably the creepiest video you'll see all week:
And the Vocoder, too, led me down its own path...
SIGSALY was a top-secret WWII program, based off of Vocoder technology and not declassified until 1976. While Vannevar Bush was speculating about potential application for the Vocoder, Allied powers were already using it for secure communication- translating human speech in real-time into electronic signal, randomly encrypted using a friggin' phonographic record, and decrypted on the other side using a phonographic record synchronized to the millisecond to its sister, tumbler-code-based technology ensuring communications 100% secure. And there was a whole company of the US Army's Signal Corps, the 805th, trained in maintenance and operation of the machines.
They remind me a lot of the FCHHM...
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