Introduction

The Guardian of All Things

Memory as Biography

“Memoria est thesaurus omnium rerum e custos.”
Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

—MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO

I first conceived of writing about the story of memory more than thirty years ago, as the result of two experiences in my early adulthood.

I joined the San Jose Mercury News as a daily technology reporter—probably the first in the world—in late 1979. It was a thrilling beat: Silicon Valley was in its first great flowering, and other than a few trade reporters, I had it all to myself. I covered the last great days of Hewlett-Packard and the first few years of Apple. I interviewed all of the soon-legendary first generation of Valley entrepreneurs, from the men who founded the semiconductor industry to the builders of the first personal computers, disk drives, and video games.

I felt myself (accurately, as it turned out) to be uniquely positioned to watch up close the most important story of my time as it unfolded. And as I raced around the Valley and did my interviews and wrote my stories I learned two things. One was that even in as scientific and empirical an industry as high tech, the real story was always elusive and the official histories were rarely correct.

But it was the other thing I learned that eventually led me to write this book. Wherever I went in those days, I was told how lucky I was to be covering Silicon Valley at that moment. That the current efflorescence of new companies and new products would be a brief one. And that the glory days were already coming to an end.

Why? Memory, they told me. Chips and processors are getting faster and more powerful by the year. But they are solid-state; they need only be miniaturized; their path is clear. But memory, I was told, is a different story: Chip memory can’t keep up the pace, and magnetic memory is all about spinning disks and moving heads and motors. Disk memory is a machine with moving parts; it’ll never keep pace with logic chips and microprocessors.

And yet as the years passed, almost magically, memory kept up. Somehow, the engineers and scientists who worked in memory always found a way to progress each of the technologies—semiconductor, magnetic, optical, and odd little experimental designs like magnetic “bubbles”—and always managed to keep up. Sometimes these companies, despite often being in competition with one another, seem to work together—like rugby players making their way downfield, flinging lateral passes from one company or industry to the next … always making forward progress, and always staying just ahead of the other guys.

It struck me then, and I still believe, that these memory folks were the great unsung heroes of the electronics age. While others enjoyed the limelight and the glory for their achievements, those who toiled in the memory business—on whom all of the others depended for survival—did so (with the rare exception of an Al Shugart) in the shadows of near-anonymity. I resolved then to tell their story.

The second experience was the death of my father.

My dad was a remarkable character: tough, brilliant, and a hero. When he died at sixty-seven, he had lived what for most men would have been a couple lives. He had survived swallowing razors in a carnival sideshow, murderous hobos riding the rails, thirty missions as a bombardier in a B-17 over Europe, gun battles as a spy in Germany and North Africa, encephalitis, car crashes, a Tibetan earthquake, and three heart attacks. And in the end, what killed him was that most common domestic injury of middle-aged men: He fell off a ladder and fractured his skull.

He didn’t die quickly; he was too tough for that. Instead he lingered, in a semicoma, as his wife and adult children visited him each day in the intensive-care ward of the county hospital.

It was on one of those days when my wife and I visited him that we were met in the entryway to the ward by one of the doctors. “Your father,” he told me, “is doing the most unusual thing. We can’t figure it out. Would you watch him for a while and tell us what you think it is?”

I pulled a chair up next to my father’s bed and leaned close. At first, he looked as he did on all of the other days: stretched out in his slightly tilted hospital bed, a bank of monitors beside him, and an oxygen mask on his face. But something had changed: Instead of lying quiet and still, my father’s eyes were open and unfocused. His left hand, all but immobile until now, had crept up above the top of the blanket, and his fingers were tapping the air. And beneath his oxygen mask, I could see my dad’s lips moving, as if he were speaking in a crisp and systematic way.

I leaned over and put my ear to his cheek. I could see his fingers still tapping the air just in front of me.

I heard the doctor’s voice behind me. “Do you know what he’s doing?”

I stood up and turned around. “Yes. I believe he’s going through the preflight checklist for a B-17 bomber. The oxygen mask must have set off a memory. See his fingers? I think he’s flipping toggles and switches and tapping gauges.”

“Really,” said the doctor. “Amazing.” And he walked away.

I watched my father. Somehow, a half-century later, it was all still there—every step, every reading, and every switch to flip. I’m certain that even he didn’t know he remembered. After all, he had washed out of pilot school—that’s why he became a bombardier and navigator. So his time in the pilot’s seat must have been a brief one. And yet, that had been enough to imprint the memory of an incredibly complex experience, at age twenty-two, into my father’s brain until the day he died. What else was in there? Was everything in there—all of the memories of a lifetime? And were they in all of us?

I have always been haunted by what I saw in my father that day. Losing him was painful enough—but the realization that his whole lifetime of memories, still present, might have been lost as well added to the heartbreak. And in the years since, I’ve followed the latest discoveries in the cognitive sciences and neuroscience, stories of prodigious feats of human memory, and the growing body of work in brain implants and brain-machine interconnections. All of them hinted, as did my father that day, of something vast and awesome hidden just beyond our reach. So did watching my two boys, as babies, as they seemed to grab the entire world with their minds.

My own career has been a busy one, not least the writing of a small shelf full of books bearing my name as author. Through it all, I never gave up on my plan to write the story of memory, both human and artificial, and how they interact to make us who we are. Several times over the years I proposed the book to publishers … only to have them (figuratively) yawn at the prospect of a dreary tome about disk drives, and counterpropose some other book idea (“How about a book about Apple?”). About a decade ago, I bounced the idea back and forth with the BBC’s former NASA reporter and legendary science historian James Burke (author of Connections), an old friend. But our plans went nowhere—though his readable style and sense of fun is something I’ve aspired to in this book.

One thing I’ve learned in a long career as a journalist and author is that if you wait long enough, people will come around to even the craziest idea. In the end, it was an ABCNews.com column of mine, no doubt combined with the popularity of books like Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near, and the ubiquitous little miracle of the semiconductor memory “thumb drive,” that at last made memory memorable … and after twenty years of trying, I was finally given the opportunity by the kind people at St. Martin’s Press to write this book.

Strangely, after decades of patiently waiting for the chance, when I finally sat down to write it, I felt under the gun—as if I were in my own race against the future. Because of the technological innovations of the intervening years, what I had envisioned as a celebration of the magnificence of the human brain and the superhuman achievements of the builders of artificial memory had now become something more ominous and compelling. There was a growing sense in high-tech, scientific research, computer science, and even philosophy and religion that the two great paths of memory, the one internal and organic and the other external and mechanical, having run in parallel now for millennia, were suddenly about to converge—perhaps even in our lifetime. And when that occurred, the collision might very well change the very meaning of being human. Suddenly I was not just an entertainer but a messenger; not just a historian but a futurist.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy myself writing this book. There is nothing like sweeping across the entire span of human existence, drawing connections between events thousands of years apart, bringing to their proper prominence events that are normally ignored by history texts, and showing how a decision made then has, through a long causal chain of subsequent decisions made by the most diverse imaginable collection of men and women, become an imperative in our lives now.

But most of all, in the final chapters, I got to visit with a lot of old friends and acquaintances, many of them now long gone, who created our fast-moving, scary, and often exhilarating high-tech modern world. To see them now as honored historical eminences—and to remember them as just hardworking, everyday men and women—was to be reminded that both genius and glory are within the reach of everyone if we’re willing to risk everything in pursuit of our vision. I’m thrilled that many of them are still around to see their story told at last.

As you will see in the pages ahead, the story of memory is, in the end, the story of freedom. From Paleolithic tribes to modern nations, whoever controls memory holds power. So the history of memory—of the evolution of the human brain, of the invention of speaking and writing, of the invention of ever-new ways to record experience, of the mastery of machines and the exploration of mind, of the slow extension of ownership of memory from shamans to rulers to scribes to bureaucrats to everyone—is also the history of the liberation of the human spirit. It is a memoir of memory, and of the democratization of remembrance—and its control.

Each chapter of this book is the story of one major step in the history of memory. Each has its protagonists, its paradigm-shifting new invention, its cultural transformation … and, in the end, its new hunger created by the fulfillment of the last desire. That hunger will never disappear; it was with us when Heidelberg Man struggled to make himself understood 500,000 years ago … and it will be with us on the day, if it comes, when we decide to shed our skins and, in search of immortality, climb into our machines.

I began this book thinking of memory as a discrete phenomenon: a region in our brains and a feature in our computers. I finished this book understanding that both are inextricable from what they serve. To lose our memories, as human beings, is to lose our identity, just as the loss of memory to a computer reduces it to little more than an adding machine. Good or bad, memories provide us not only with identity, but existence itself—and to forget, or to be forgotten, is its own kind of death.

As I said, when I began to write this book I thought, after twenty years of waiting, I could now take my time. And certainly there was no need to hurry when writing about Gilgamesh, or Saint Isidore, or even Giordano Bruno. But as I delved deeper into the recent works of scientists I knew, such as Ray Kurzweil and Gordon Bell, it struck me that the next chapter in the story of memory that they were predicting—if accurate—was so shocking and so imminent that it might crush many of us in its path. What had become a lark to tell became a duty to warn … even if I personally doubted the likelihood of those events occurring.

Finally, if you haven’t concluded this already, I believe that the story of memory is as epic, heroic, and thrilling as any comparable story of battles, empires, artists, or monarchies across the span of human history. And I hope that I have captured at least a little of that in the pages that follow. And I hope I’ve honored the men and women of memory whose achievements I promised to celebrate all those years ago.

Comedy or tragedy, in the theater of memory we are all players. So, raise the curtains and we’ll begin with the first act.