Microfilm
The storage medium vannevar-bush assumed would make the memex physically feasible in as-we-may-think (1945). “The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm.”
In the essay
- Bush projects a future linear reduction factor of ~100, giving “a total factor of 10,000 between the bulk of the ordinary record on books, and its microfilm replica.”
- Vivid claims: the Encyclopædia Britannica “reduced to the volume of a matchbox”; a million-volume library “compressed into one end of a desk”; the whole human record since movable type “lugged off in a moving van.”
- He stresses that compression alone is not enough — “one needs not only to make and store a record but also to be able to consult it” — which sets up his real subject, associative-trails.
Significance
Microfilm is the period-specific technology that made Bush’s vision concrete; the function it served (dense, cheap, personal storage) is now trivially met by digital files — which is part of why the llm-wiki pattern can be realized today.