Diagrams of Memex [Transcription of Video]


Kahn: The article finally appeared in 1945, just days after the atomic bombing in Japan attracted a lot of people's attention, and then it was then reprinted in Life Magazine. The illustrations that appeared in the Life Magazine reprint there were done by a technical illustrator by the name of Alfred Crimi, who had been working at Sperry-Rand. He was called by the editors at Life and asked if he could please illustrate this article, because when it first appeared in Atlantic Monthly, there had been no pictures. Of course, Life Magazine really liked to have pictures. So Crimi read the article. That is really all he had to go on, and he came up with these drawings. His notion of what it looked like was based upon the text, and as well as some of the technical illustrating he had been doing for the different kinds of machines that Sperry had been building. He then sent the illustrations to Bush, and Bush said, yep, that's OK. There wasn't really any more detail to it than that.


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