Remember This?(Gordon Bell's works)

October arrived in 1998, and Gordon Bell went paperless, after hearing from a professor at Carnegie Mellon who was engaged in a project to scan a million books and post them online. The professor, a friend of Bell's named Raj Reddy, had called to ask if he could scan and post Bell's books, including one on how to start a high-tech business. Bell said, "Of course." This, by the way, is the Gordon Bell, aged seventy-two, of Microsoft, who has been described as "the Frank Lloyd Wright of computers"; who, at the Digital Equipment Corporation, was among the first engineers to fashion computers into a network; who led the National Science Foundation effort to link the world's supercomputers--the Internet. The Gordon Bell, incidentally, who believes that one day houses will have no windows, so it won't matter where they are--screens on the walls will display whatever we want to look at. (Bell would like the screens in his dining room to display the view from a window of the Orient Express; he would also like to hear the train's sound effects.) The Gordon Bell who, owing to Reddy's call, and by means of custom programs and gadgets, now collects the daily minutiae of his life so emphatically that he owns the most extensive and unwieldy personal archive of its kind in the world.

The first epiphany of three in the making of Bell's archive occurred when Bell realized that if Reddy was scanning books into a computer, Bell could scan all the papers in his file cabinets and in the boxes crowding his garage, in California, and then throw them away. He could also scan his scrapbooks and photographs, the business cards he has saved, the posters on his walls, and his many commemorative T-shirts. It was too late to include his collections of razor blades, postcards, balsa-wood model airplanes, and salt and pepper shakers--those had been dispersed in childhood--but not his interesting coffee mugs, which were first photographed, or the manuals for his appliances, "because you can never find the damn things," Bell says.

The scanning took years, and it continues. Bell doesn't do the work himself--he hired Vicki Rozycki, a pleasant, determined, and resourceful woman, for the task. "There was a big, big file cabinet and bankers boxes that were visually a little overwhelming," Rozycki says. "But it wasn't like there was this Sisyphus guy pushing the rock up the hill."

Bell's archive now also contains a hundred and twenty-two thousand e-mails; fifty-eight thousand photographs; thousands of recordings of phone calls he has made; every Web page he has visited and instant-messaging exchange he has conducted since 2003; all the activity of his desktop (which windows, for example, he has opened); eight hundred pages of health records, including information on the life of the battery in his pacemaker; and a sprawling category he describes as "ephemera," which contains such things as books he has written and books from his library; the labels of bottles of wine he has enjoyed; and the record of a bicycle trip through Burgundy, where he tried to eat in as many starred restaurants as he could (he averaged 2.2 stars per meal--"I do a lot of measuring," he says).

In 2001, Bell published an article in a technical journal to announce that he had finished "the intellectual part" of going paperless. Then he had his second epiphany. He recalled a piece, published in The Atlantic in July, 1945, by Vannevar Bush, called "As We May Think." Bush, who had been the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during the Second World War, speculated about what work scientists would take up, now that they no longer had to invent weapons. Among other things, he decided that innovations in photography would produce smaller cameras. "The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut," he wrote. He or she could take photographs all day. The problem would be what to do with them. "Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library," Bush continued. "It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, 'memex' will do." Memex stood for "memory extender."

A memex would consist of a desk that had "slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading." Anything entered into the memex would be saved on microfilm. Bush thought that "if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely."

By means of a code, a memex user could retrieve a book. He could project a book on one screen and a photograph, say, on another. When he found a congenial collection of material, a trail, he could join it together and save it, or add it to another trail--anticipating both Wikipedia and Google.