(2015-05-24) Victor The Web Of Alexandria

Bret Victor: The Web of Alexandria. Vannevar Bush's "library of a million volumes, compressed into one end of a desk" may sound quaint to us today.

The web, of course, took a different approach. A million volumes, yes, but our desks remain empty. Instead, when we summon a volume, we are granted a transient and ephemeral peek at its sole instance, out there somewhere in the world

Two thoughts:

It's interesting that life itself chose Bush's approach. Every cell of every organism has a full copy of the genome. That works pretty well -- DNA gets damaged, cells die, organisms die, the genome lives on.

It's also interesting to consider how someone from Bush's time might view our situation. For someone who's thinking about a library in every desk, going on the web today might feel like visiting the Library of Alexandria. Things didn't work out so well with the Library of Alexandria.

It's not working so well today either. (LinkRot; Personal Web Archive)