While surfing the Getty Research Institute's
Metadate resources (which is a great resource for information standards), I
ran across this quote from
Vannevar Bush's profoundly influential article "As We May Think"
(which influenced Ted Nelson's Xanadu, which influenced Tim Berners-Lee's World
Wide Web):
Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if
he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and
objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that
he needs to mechanize his record more fully if he is to push his experiment to
its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by
overtaxing his limited memory. His excursion may be more enjoyable if he can
reacquire the privilege of forgetting manifold things he does not need to
have immediately to hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if
they prove important. Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think", The
Atlantic Monthly, July 1945. [emphasis added]
http://www.w3.org/History/1945/vbush/vbush-all.shtml
I love this quote because it reminds me of my
favorite quote about the importance
of good notation:
By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work,
a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and, in
effect, increases the mental power of the race. Before the introduction of the
Arabic notation, multiplication was difficult, and the division even of
integers called into play the highest mathematical faculties. Probably nothing
in the modern world would have more astonished a Greek mathematician than to
learn that ... a large proportion of the population of Western Europe could
perform the operation of division for the largest numbers. This fact would
have seemed to him a sheer impossibility ... Our modern power of easy
reckoning with decimal fractions is the almost miraculous result of the
gradual discovery of a perfect notation. [...] By the aid of symbolism, we can
make transitions in reasoning almost mechanically, by the eye, which otherwise
would call into play the higher faculties of the brain. [...] It is a
profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people
when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking
of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilisation
advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform
without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry
charges in a battle -- they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh
horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. [emphasis added]
-- Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics, 1911
So Vannevar its talking about enabling humanity
to simplify thought by minimizing what must be remembered, and Whitehead is
talking about simplifying thought by minimizing the operations we can do without
conscious thought. Both desires presages the computer's ability to augment human
thought by carrying out mental operations, including memory, for us.
7:26:41 AM 
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