In our reality, Ted Nelson served as a muse rather than the Internet’s architect. Legend has it that he conceived of Xanadu as an antidote (or amplifier) for his attention deficit disorder. He dreamed of a word processor that allowed users to surf through and freely explore associations, related material, and alternate contexts of any given piece

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Part of the origin myth of modern computing is the story of a golden age in the 1960s and 1970s. In this story, visionary pioneers pursued a dream in which computers enabled powerful tools for thought, that is, tools to augment human intelligence

E.g., Douglas Engelbart, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (1962).

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From the memex to the web to wikis to org-mode to Project Xanadu to attempts to make a map of every thought a person thinks: the augmentation of memory has been an extremely generative vision for computing.