Sublime

Vannevar Bush wrote of a “scholar’s workstation” called a “Memex,” which was “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 an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

But to really fulfill Vannevar Bush’s vision, you needed a huge system where people could freely post and link their documents.

Bush, FDR’s former war advisor, wrote of a hypothetical computer or “Memex” machine he intended as an extension of human memory.

Bush’s new organization, eventually called the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), would create the opportunity Bush sought for scientists, engineers, and inventors at universities and private labs to explore the bizarre.

Entitled “As We May Think,” it outlined a vast storage system called a “memex,” where documents would be connected, and could be recalled, by information breadcrumbs called “trails of association.”