[HN Gopher] Vannevar Bush: A Public Sector Entrepreneur
___________________________________________________________________
Vannevar Bush: A Public Sector Entrepreneur
Author : janvdberg
Score : 37 points
Date : 2022-03-19 22:48 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (nowpublishers.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nowpublishers.com)
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _[...] the entrepreneurship literature would have it that
| entrepreneurship policy falls like manna from governments[,
| ]devised and implemented by nameless bureaucrats [...] Al Link
| ... puts the person, with all their attendant humanness, at the
| center of entrepreneurship policy [...] people matter for policy,
| just as they do for entrepreneurship. [...] Al explains with
| crystal clear clarity what exactly shaped [Vannevar] Bush, and
| how he in turn shaped America's science and technology policy,
| and ultimately the emergence of a knowledge driven economy and
| society. [Al Link 's ]inspirational book, A Generosity of Spirit:
| The Early History of the Research Triangle Park (1995) [...]
| focused on the people and their leadership in transforming North
| Carolina[: ...] the strategy of transforming North Carolina did
| not emerge from bloodless, nameless bureaucrats pulling the
| levers of public policy, but rather from the bold, creative, and
| entrepreneurial action of leaders. [...] Al ... makes it clear
| that Vannevar Bush's legacy and imprint on American science and
| technology extend well beyond his death[: ]Al makes a compelling
| case that the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which is generally
| attributed with unleashing scientific research at American
| universities for commercialization and innovation, has its roots
| in the spirit and ideas of Bush. [... E]ntrepreneurship in the
| public sector can ignite not just science and technology policy,
| but ultimately innovation policy and the attendant economic
| prosperity_
|
| (From the Preface from David B. Audretsch)
| KevinEldon wrote:
| Vannevar Bush's legacy of public sector entrepreneurship lives on
| in Raytheon, the company he co-founded.
| hinkley wrote:
| Someone did me the favor years ago of pestering me to read As We
| May Think.
|
| If you haven't, you should. It's interesting on its own, but
| particularly because it was published in the summer before WWII
| ended (when he was running what to me sounds like a precursor to
| DARPA). After the war he pushed for the creation of the National
| Science Foundation.
|
| I mention the date specifically because I had to triple check it
| because there is no fucking way someone wrote this in 1945. It
| was, and he did.
| carapace wrote:
| FWIW, seconded. It's amazing:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Just in case: Vannevar Bush is the ideator of the "Memex", the
| idea for an (electro-photo-mechanical, desk sized) information
| organizer, between the miniaturized library with
| annotation/filing facilities and the personal assistant - a
| precursor (especially of the documentational side of Decision
| Support Systems - of which the World Wide Web could be considered
| a distributed implementation).
|
| The article which described it, "As we may think":
| http://web.mit.edu/STS.035/www/PDFs/think.pdf
|
| > _The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the
| origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is
| studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the
| English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens
| of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he
| runs through an encyclopedia, finds and interesting but sketchy
| article, leaves it projected, Next, in a history, he finds
| another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes,
| building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment
| of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it
| by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident
| that the elastic properties of available materials had a great
| deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which
| takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical
| constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own.
| Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of
| materials available to him. [...]_
| Ankaios wrote:
| Our user interfaces are still not as good as a memex for
| research.
| simonw wrote:
| That article is such a classic. 77 years later people are still
| trying to build what he described there.
|
| I was sniffing around with GitHub Projects (beta) in the
| browser network tools the other day and spotted "memex" in the
| private API URLs they were using!
| greenail wrote:
| "it wasn't all magic" an NSA history by Colin Burke has some very
| interesting stories about Vannevar.
| TrevorFSmith wrote:
| Bush is an interesting person (I built a desk-sized Memex
| "reproduction" and am currently building 20 tiny Memex!) but I
| wonder about using him as a role model. The era of Big Science
| that he helped create after WWII was wildly one-sided, with most
| of the money going to the large firms that built the war machine.
|
| Many excellent inventions and innovations resulted but all from
| within ~one worldview and that's not a productive way to run
| greenfield research today.
| marredpally wrote:
| Loonshots[1] has a chapter on the impact Bush had on the war and
| generations of national research afterwards. It's crazy to think
| he did the things he did, when he did them.
|
| [1] https://www.bahcall.com/book/
| jhbadger wrote:
| There was a book length biography of Vannevar Bush published a
| few years ago -- "Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of
| the American Century" by G. Pascal Zachary that was quite good.
| The phrase "Endless Frontier" is a a reference to an essay that
| Bush wrote entitled "Science, the Endless Frontier" that argued
| for the continued federal funding of science after WWII.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-03-22 23:01 UTC)