The Memex, the Manhatten Project, and the month of July 1945 (Interconnected)

I wonder about these two legacies, the Memex and the Manhatten Project, and which has had the greater influence on the world.

Probably in the year of Bush’s death, 1974, still a decade before the first popular personal computer, and at the height of the Cold War, Bush would have seen the atomic bomb as his project which most changed the world. Perhaps now, in 2021, it’s the Memex?

I know it’s only a coincidence, these two events in the same month, but it invites the comparison. Could Bush’s perspective that led to the Memex have even been formed without his exposure to the vast scale of cross-pollinating scientific research, a context only possible in wartime?

My fear is that they’re two sides of the same coin, and that’s an ugly lesson.

My hope is that what Bush had is something that didn’t require war (and what a war) to be formulated, which is a theory of human betterment and a belief in human progress, and it’s that framework that guided his formative speculations, and that at least is a method we can safely imitate.