Memex
Proper name
The memex is a device that Vannevar Bush described in his 1945 essay “As We May Think”. It was meant to look like a desk and to store its user’s books, records and correspondence on microfilm. It was never built.
Bush’s most important idea was the associative trail. Users would chain documents together, add their own comments and pass these trails on to other people. Links between notes work in a similar way today.
In my articles
In my second brain series, the story of machines that support memory starts with the memex. Bush saw it as a personal extension of memory, but the job of keeping the documents in order still fell to its user.
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All entriesVannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) was an American engineer and inventor who wrote the 1945 essay “As We May Think”, which describes a device called the memex.