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PRIMITIVE_FUTURES

                                             July 16, 2021

Englebart, back in 1962 was fantasizing about a
future gadget-- a new kind of typewriter paired
with a "light pen" that could scan the output       Optical character
from the typewriter and use it as input to type     recognition of just any
a new document.                                     typewriten font didn't
                                                    seem plausible to
Englebart laboriously spells out the way            Englebart back then,
this could be used to do things we now              though only 15 years later
do routinely with  word processing                  there were crude forms of
software on computers.                              it commercially available.

But Englebart, at that stage, was already
thinking about doing such things with
computers-- his combo type-writer and
scanner notion is presented as an even
simpler idea that could have big effects.



                                             My first impression was that
                                             this might be a case like the
                                             Vaneavar Bush concept of the
                                             "memex", a case where a smart
                                             guy was carefully envisioning
                                             improvements in information
                                             handling without quite going
                                             all the way--

                                             (The memex was oriented toward
                                             dynamically indexing microfilm,
                                             letting a scholar establish
                                             association links that would be
                                             saved electronically, *somehow*.)




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