Next stop iPad: Vannevar Bush, shown here with an analog
computer he’d invented, imagined a day when tiny devices
contained libraries. In a 1933 essay for TR, Vannevar Bush, then
MIT’s dean of engineering, wrote a sardonic report in which he
pretended to be somebody from the distant future who looked back
with distaste on the “preposterous” and “grotesque” state of
technology in the 1930s. To illustrate his points, he followed a
hypothetical professor confronting the various indignities of a
typical day. We read of the trials of the men of that day and
wonder that they could have been apparently content with their
mode of life, its discomforts, and its annoyances. Instead, we
should admire them for having made the best of a hard situation,
and treasure the rugged qualities which they exemplified …
Consider, for example, a professor in some northern urban
university, and let us attempt to appreciate the sort of life he
led, with a sympathetic attempt to evaluate the extent to which
his efforts were circumscrib