The Memex
Also: Vannevar Bush, As We May Think
Vannevar Bush's 1945 imagined desk that stores all your books and records and links them by 'associative trails.'
In "As We May Think" (The Atlantic, July 1945), Vannevar Bush — who had just helped run American science through the war — worried about a coming flood of information no one could navigate. His answer was the memex: a desk-sized device storing a person's entire library on microfilm, with screens and a mechanism for building "associative trails" — chains of linked items the user could name, save, and share.
Bush's insight was that the human mind works by association, not by rigid index, and that our information tools should too. He had no computer to build it with; the memex was mechanical, a dream of optics and levers. But the dream lit a fire.
Read directly, As We May Think is the headwaters of hypertext, of Engelbart's augmentation work, and of the entire tools-for-thought tradition. Both Engelbart and Nelson cited it as their starting point.