A Closer Look Inside Memex [Transcription of Video]

Kahn: At the end of the trail, we would end up with a spool of microfilm that could be mailed or otherwise transported to your colleague. The animation allows you to point at particular parts of the machine, such as the keyboard. If you like to go back and sort of run over that demo, what he had in mind here was the sort of keyboard on the mechanical calculators at the time. Likewise, if you wanted to review just how he also invented pen computing, you could take a look at that. What he had in mind as to how you could write on this film, and somehow record it back onto the microfilm, is kept particularly vague in the article. Likewise, if you would like to go in and take a look at the mechanism, as Crimi did, we did somehow render the microfilm transports and projectors that might make this work, but as far as the demo goes... (Upon clicking, "ha ha ha" was heard from the demo.) I think the closer you get to this mechanism, the less likely it is that it would ever work.

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