It feels weird to read about improvements that already existed when I was born. The paper is definitely interesting and extremely accurate in its predictions. Yet, I find myself trying to put place myself in the shoes of somebody in 1945 reading this article. Would this article and its content’s sound appealing to them? Is this something they desire? I feel like in the age we live in, we ironically end up going back to old mediums, since the pace of technological improvement has been so exceedingly exponential that it feels like an endless highway. A highway without an exit where the paved road below the car we’re moving in gets progressively smoother or faster, even more eco-friendly or it can even lifts off the ground. I feel like Vannevar’s work doesn’t put into perspective the current value of the mediums they were currently experiencing, such as film photography, the need to write things down, and that condensing as much information as humanly possible into one thing doesn’t necessarily mean we by attachment possess that knowledge.

It’s especially striking how close the author gets to fully predicting the personal computer. And how the machine would insert “memex” to gather more information. The detailed manner in which file sorting and file exploration is explained adds so much more visionary detail considering the time in which he wrote it.

In contrast, Tim Berners-Lee’s “Long Live The Web” reflects directly upon the impact of the personal computer existing, and the inherent connection between personal computers all across the world. The World Wide Web. 20 years after creating the world wide web, the author emphasizes the grassroots and community approach used to expand the internet as we know it. How countless contributions from different actors such as universities or governments aided in consolidating the infrastructure needed to make the WWW possible. Lee contrasts the beginning of the internet with the current reality, a reality where internet use is seemingly endless, a constant within most people’s lives, and largely controlled and manipulated by a handful of actors, oftentimes the same actors that were crucial in consolidating the web’s influence. The way in which the author emphasizes upon universality and open access is especially impactful for me.