http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think

This visionary essay by Vannevar Bush, one of the founders of the Manhattan Project, was a wellspring for decades of computer development.

The LIFE magazine version of Bush’s essay includes this leading illustration, which makes it clear that Bush’s original vision for computation included a head-mounted camera.  There’s even a reticule built-in to the user’s glasses (see right lens), which imposes a two-D registration on reality.

Bush’s essay makes reference to schemes we later learned to call hypertext, personal computers, Internet, WorldWideWeb, and speech recognition, but the idea that that Bush also wanted a head-mounted gizmo for computing is little-recognized.

This ancient MacroMind Director animation from 1995 simulates a Bush “Memex,” a conceptual ancestor of the desktop workstation which was, in real life, never built. The user would have had a camera on his head and a camera wire up his sleeve, so that he could input images onto the microfilm system as projections rolled by in front of his eyes.

http://youtu.be/c539cK58ees

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