Bush Symposium


"As We May Think" --
A Celebration of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Vision,
An Examination of What Has Been Accomplished,
and What Remains to Be Done."
Held at MIT on October 12 and 13, 1995

This was a research symposium, so it was not designed to be a "media circus". There were very few people in attendance, and basically the attendees were all invited. The event was hosted by MIT and Brown University. These tapes have never been distributed so that the people who were there saw it, and the other people who weren't haven't.

The hosts were:

Andries van Dam, Brown University, Program Chair (Hypertext at Brown)
Paul Penfield, Jr., MIT Host (LCS, MIT)

Andries VanDam was the Master of Ceremonies. He is a central key figure in the field of hypertext, and this Symposium in particular. I am not including a lot about VanDam today because of time limitations.

The following will be our virtual guest, courtesy of these video taped clips:

Paul Kahn (Bush and Memex)
Ted Nelson (Xanadu)

I want to specifically point out that Douglas Engelbart (Augment and Bootstrap) and Tim Berners-Lee (WWW) were also speakers at the symposium. They had just as much to say and were just as significant as Bush and Nelson, and have only been left out due to time constraints as well.

This event brought together many other acknowledged founders of New Media including...

Robert Kahn (Internet)
Michael Lesk (Digital Libraries)
Nicholas Negroponte (Media Lab, MIT)
Raj Reddy (CMU)
Lee Sproull (BU)
Alan Kay (Smalltalk)

Other Credits:

Lisa Manekofsky, Administrative Coordinator NSF/ARPA Graphics and Visualization Center
Robert McDermott, Jim Rose (Utah)
Larry Gallagher, Scott Dynes, Ed Moriarity (MIT)
David Klaphank (Brown)
Other Brown and MIT Volunteers


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