Originally published in the July 1945 issue of Atlantic Monthly, Vannevar Bush‘s post-war article, As we may think, is cited often because of its intertextual breadth. In the paper, he proposes a new and radical information retrieval system called the memex (based on microfiche) that would facilitate access to the sum total of humanity’s archived knowledge.

A memex is 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.

The memex is a prototypical hypertextual system, employing selection by association, rather than by consulting an index. Though the links would exist between records rather than terms, the thought is still a powerful one, and the legacy upon which the World Wide Web and information architecture of the MacIntosh Hypercard software both draw. And, although predating Bush’s paper, it is difficult not to also draw lines of comparison with Jorge Luis Borges‘ fantastico-satirical The Library of Babel. The memex is also furniture, and as such, a vision for the personal computer.

Drawing on the legacy of Leibnitz and Babbage (Lovelace, to whom Bush seems to infer to in the statement “remarkably generous support for his time,” was not properly recognized for her contribution to computer science until the widespread publication of her writings in 1953), Bush frames his ideas as potentially flawed for being too far ahead of his time. Yet, in many respects he is firmly rooted in 1945 America. There are plenty of quaint ideas in the paper – quaint being a euphemism for the kind of thing that will get you slapped now. For instance, in describing the awesome power of computers in the future:

Such machines will have enormous appetites. One of them will take instructions and data from a whole roomful of girls armed with simple key board punches, and will deliver sheets of computed results every few minutes.

However, the importance of this entertaining paper shouldn’t be minimized, if only for its archival value. The cyborg, as recordist envisaged by Steve Mann, finds a common ancestor here, as does Stellarc‘s Third Hand. So too do we find ancestral ties to the Polaroid, Lambda or Lightjet printer, speech recognition systems, and Wikipedia.