This emphasis on search puts Microsoft on a collision course with its archrivals, Google and Apple. Each is racing to find new ways to put your most useful information—whatever that is right now—at your fingertips. Apple's latest operating system, Mac OS X Tiger, has a new way of searching a computer, called Spotlight, that quietly keeps an index of everything on the hard disk. Then, when you start a search, it quickly serves up everything that's relevant, whether it's an e-mail, office document, or PDF file. Meanwhile, equally ambitious software is in the works at Google, the company that has made its own name a synonym for searching. A new application, called Google Desktop, lets you "google" your hard disk in a way similar to a Spotlight search.

With Vista not slated for release until some time in 2006, Microsoft is already about a year behind Apple and Google. But the company is counting on its new search-centric operating system to leapfrog its competitors. If it succeeds, the loss of a year won't matter—the race for the best ways of collecting and retrieving information is clearly a marathon that will dominate the next decade of computer science and information technology.

Just as Microsoft is not alone in coming up with new search technologies, others, notably Steve Mann, are also creating gadgets that capture life bits. For years, Mann, who teaches at the University of Toronto's department of electrical and computer engineering, has spent week after week viewing, as well as recording, reality through a wearable video camera of his own design.

But all these efforts, in hardware and software—the Steve Manns on the one hand, and the Apples on the other—have focused on only half of the problem, either recording the minutes of our lives, or searching our desktops for useful minutiae already buried there. Only MyLifeBits has a binocular vision of creating digital doppelgängers for our entire lives, off-line as well as on.

Indeed, MyLifeBits is really the culmination of a 2700-year historical trend. Ever since the Greeks took the Iliad out of the singsong voices of traveling balladeers and set it down on clay tablets, the world's troves of recorded information have swelled relentlessly. Not surprisingly, humankind's strategy has been to rely less and less on actually remembering, and more and more on being able to find something when we need it. The Gospels, Gutenberg, and Google have all been steps along the way.

In 1945, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, Raytheon Co. cofounder, and presidential science advisor Vannevar Bush set out a blueprint for the electronic age, in an Atlantic Monthly article titled "As We May Think." Foremost among its astoundingly prescient ideas is a universal look-up machine Bush called the Memex, "a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is," he wrote, "an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory."

The 60-year-old manifesto is a nearly complete specification for MyLifeBits. The project's three major components are anticipated by Bush's descriptions of a head-mounted camera to capture information, annotations to help find data after the fact, and ways of organizing a collection, such as links from one document to another. Such a system has been something of a holy grail among information technologists for more than half a century. Microsoft may become the first company to pull it all together.

For Bell, the project began modestly enough seven years ago when a friend, Raj Reddy, asked about electronic copies of some of Bell's books and papers. Reddy, a distinguished computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, had in mind an idea that would become known as the Million Book Project. Reddy didn't intend to digitize a million books himself. The library project was a way of asking, what resources would it take to scan in a million books? Bell was delighted by the question. "Let's start with mine!" he told Reddy. Using regular desktop scanners and some optical-character-reading software, he digitized his own 6 books, 7 patents, and 96 technical articles.

Bell remembers connecting the million-book idea with a prediction from Bill Gates's 1995 book, The Road Ahead. "Someday we'll be able to record everything we see and hear," Gates wrote. Bell was in many ways the ideal person to try to pull off such a feat. His long and complicated life includes two electrical engineering degrees from MIT, two stints at Digital during its 1970s glory days, and six years teaching computer science at Carnegie Mellon. Then there were two years in the late 1980s as a director at the National Science Foundation, where he was responsible for the NSFnet, shortly before it was handed off to the private sector and became the Internet of today. He's also been an angel investor and a board member of more start-ups than he can recall.