A link joins two items. A trail is a kept, ordered path through many, and it can travel to someone else.
Items. One person's books, records and letters, all on one desk, any of them shown quickly.
Joined. Items are joined by association, as the mind works, not filed in one place each. Any item can call up another.
A trail. A run of joins, kept in order, can be followed again later.
Handed on. The trail is copied and given to someone else, who adds it to their own memex.
The essay says
What it claims
- The record of what people know has outgrown the means of consulting it. The essay's opening argument.
- A device the essay names the memex, a desk that stores a person's books, records and letters, could hold everything that person consults and show any of it quickly. Where the memex is introduced.
- The memex would join items by association, as the mind does, rather than file each one in a single place: any item can call up another, and a run of such joins forms a trail that is kept and can be followed again. Where trails are described.
- A trail can be copied and handed to someone else, who adds it to their own memex. The same passage.
My take
What I make of it
The trail is the part that has aged best. A link joins two items; a trail is an ordered path through many, made by someone for a reason, and handed on so a reader can follow the same path. That is close to what a map is in a folio library: rows in reading order, each with a reason to follow it.
What the essay leaves to the person, folio leaves to a gate. A memex trail can point at an item that was later changed or lost, and nothing notices. In a library, a link that no longer resolves fails the gate, and a record that was wrong is corrected by a new one that points back, as How corrections work explains.
| A memex trail | A folio map | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | An ordered run of joined items | Rows in reading order |
| How it travels | Copied into another memex | Committed, so every reader follows it |
| When a target goes | Nothing notices | The gate fails |
In "As We May Think", what is a trail?
A run of items joined one to the next in the memex, kept so it can be followed again and passed to someone else.In "As We May Think", how does the memex join items?
By association: any item can call up another, and a run of such joins forms a trail.Still to check
The claims are limited to the essay's best-known ideas, the memex and its trails, and were written from accounts of the essay rather than from a copy read for this page. Their locations are given by passage, not by page or section, until they are checked against the text.