Vannevar Bush — As We May Think (1945)

Introduction

Bush, writing at the end of World War II, imagines new ways of handling the flood of scientific knowledge. His proposal — the Memex, a personal information machine — introduced the idea of "associative trails," which can be seen as the conceptual ancestor of the hyperlink.

Excerpt

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, "Memex" will do. 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.

The owner of the Memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. He has dozens of pertinent books and articles. He finds a trial of one such bow described in an old book; he inserts the book into the Memex and runs it off onto microfilm. Next, he ties it into the trial he made yesterday. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.