Doug Engelbart Institute posted a link to videos and transcripts of the Oct 1995 Brown / MIT Vannevar Bush symposium celebrating the 50th anniversary of AWMT:
"As We May Think: A Celebration of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Vision,
An Examination of What Has Been Accomplished,
and What Remains to Be Done"
Excellent talks and panels with Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Andy van Dam, Alan Kay, Tim Berners-Lee, Paul Kahn, Lee Sproul, Raj Reddy, Michael Lesk, Bob Kahn, and others.
Douglas Adams was the dinner speaker (great talk, unfortunately no video or audio record).
"The event was in fact an exhibition of Bush's legacy, a self-referential, interweaving (intertwingling, Ted Nelson would say) of all the themes - social, technological, and psychological - from Bush's paper. In the course of two days it became very clear how deep and ambitious - socially and culturally - Bush's most central ideas were. At every turn we were reminded that Bush was writing about how fundamentally new intellectual practices could change the entire landscape of human social life. Bush's vision was not just about hypertext, or data management, or information retrieval, let alone about microfilm or calculating machines; rather, it was about extending the power of human beings by giving them radically new ways of working together.
The goal of fundamentally changing how we work in order to address pressing human problems continued to be central throughout the development of Bush's legacy in the '60s and '70s, most obviously in the work of Engelbart, Nelson, and Kay. Its continued evidence throughout the symposium - even (perhaps most notably)in the presentation of Tim Berners-Lee, the youngest speaker - and the warm response of the audience made it clear that this optimistic social agenda still resonates. It seems that we are not too jaded, skeptical, or post-modern to believe, 50 years later, that technology can bring us 'a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge', one that will promote 'the application of science to the needs and desires of man' ('As We May Think')."
AWMT was certainly a hot topic and required course reading from 1968 on... I was a student of Andy van Dam's in that era and early user of the Hypertext Editing System developed at Brown with Ted Nelson.
Certainly for Intermedia and Nelson's "Literary Machines" era; Nelson published a full copy of AWMT in his 1980 book.
Doug Engelbart frequently tells the story of reading "As We May Think" as an enlisted radar technician in a thatched hut Red Cross Library in 1945 (see Belinda Barnet link below)
Ted Nelson said in an Aug 2000 telephone interview:
"I think I read it when it came out in 1945. Since I was eight my memory is necessarily incomplete. Everyone else who would have been in the family is now deceased. But we did subscribe to the Atlantic Monthly and I think there's a very good chance I read it at that time." ~ Ted Nelson
Belinda Barnet's PhD thesis on the intellectual history of hypertext will be published as a book early next year, including extensive interviews with Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Andy van Dam.
I wrote my masters dissertation on hypermedia back in 1991, and I remember that references to AWMT kept appearing in papers I was reading. When I read it I could see how it related to hypermedia as it existed in the early nineties, but 1945 seemed rather distant and the paper seemed to stand on its own, rather than being the start of something. I haven't thought about it since, but it now seems obvious that this was because of my lack of knowledge at the time. I wasn't aware then of Englebart's work, for example.
I re-read Literary Machines only last year, but had completely forgotten that Nelson included AWMT in it. I may pull it off the bookshelf again tonight.
I think the trail led from Doug Engelbart and folk who were directly or indirectly influenced by his 1968 Demo as well as Ted Nelson and Computer Lib / Literary Machines.
Doug donated his personal copy of "As We May Think" with marginal notes to the Computer History Museum (you can download a copy). He wrote about Bush's influence in "Augmenting Human Intelligence" (1962) and talked about it in a Stanford University Oral History interview.
"As We May Think: A Celebration of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Vision, An Examination of What Has Been Accomplished, and What Remains to Be Done"
Excellent talks and panels with Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Andy van Dam, Alan Kay, Tim Berners-Lee, Paul Kahn, Lee Sproul, Raj Reddy, Michael Lesk, Bob Kahn, and others.
Douglas Adams was the dinner speaker (great talk, unfortunately no video or audio record).
http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush-symposium....
"The event was in fact an exhibition of Bush's legacy, a self-referential, interweaving (intertwingling, Ted Nelson would say) of all the themes - social, technological, and psychological - from Bush's paper. In the course of two days it became very clear how deep and ambitious - socially and culturally - Bush's most central ideas were. At every turn we were reminded that Bush was writing about how fundamentally new intellectual practices could change the entire landscape of human social life. Bush's vision was not just about hypertext, or data management, or information retrieval, let alone about microfilm or calculating machines; rather, it was about extending the power of human beings by giving them radically new ways of working together.
The goal of fundamentally changing how we work in order to address pressing human problems continued to be central throughout the development of Bush's legacy in the '60s and '70s, most obviously in the work of Engelbart, Nelson, and Kay. Its continued evidence throughout the symposium - even (perhaps most notably)in the presentation of Tim Berners-Lee, the youngest speaker - and the warm response of the audience made it clear that this optimistic social agenda still resonates. It seems that we are not too jaded, skeptical, or post-modern to believe, 50 years later, that technology can bring us 'a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge', one that will promote 'the application of science to the needs and desires of man' ('As We May Think')."
from http://www.cs.brown.edu/memex/Bush_Symposium_Interact.html