FREEDOM LAUNCHED IN LONDON YESTERDAY ...

[Michael Grove]

   at the Royal Geographical Society with Sir Bob Geldof

  We need FREEDOM to be argued, we need it to be read  

  and talked about and understood. It may be right, it may

  be wrong. But you need someone as committed as Jeremy

  to trying to understand what gets us here.

                                                        Sir Bob Geldof

   A fellow Briton - more famous these-days in the USA than the UK for his TV

   series entitled Connections - also subscribes, in not dissimilar fashion, to this

   less and less perspective. I am, of course, referring to James Burke who has

   inspired a generation of teachers, students and innovative thinkers.

   James Burke's work explores the idiosyncratic relationships between

   technology, science, and social change throughout modern history - and

   in so doing he has brought the world a unique perspective on how all of

   history is interrelated & interdependent.  His KnowledgeWeb Project has

   been established to promote the concepts -  which he established through a

   chain of events - to communicate the relevant connections in history which

   have changed the world. I publish here today my own chain of events which

   have resulted in Brian establishing the zaadz environment.

 

   3 years before the United Nations made its Declaration of Human

   Rights President Roosevelt's science advisor, Dr. Vannevar Bush - published   

   in the July edition of Atlantic Monthly - his idea of a wondrous machine which

   he called a memex. A machine which would enable you to search through

   information with incredible speed. You could pinpoint a thought in a book,

   leap to a related pointing a newspaper story and go on linking ideas until you

   built, in essence, a record tracing your own train of thought - one which you

   could pass along to friends and associates. All of which would be considerably

   closer to the way the MIND works.

 
   ... he further added As Bush described it, the human minds snaps instantly

   from one related thought to another, following an intricate web of associative

   trails - synapse to synapse -" .. the speed of the action, the intricacy of the

   trails, the detail of mental picture is awe inspiring ...."

   "Man cannot hope to fully duplicate this mental process artificially...

    Following Apple's European launch of the Macintosh at Didacta in Basle

    in 1984 - Vannevar Bush's idea of the memex was taken by Apple and

    developed into HyperCard. The Apple Macintosh and HyperCard, back-ended

    by a NEXT server, was then used by Tim Berners Lee to create an electronic

    work-group environment - global in context - to facilitate the connections

    between all the scientists and their associates involved in the CERN project.