From Memex to Hypertext

In 1945, Vannevar Bush, the engineer who designed the world's most powerful analog computers and the official responsible for U.S. scientific research and development during WWII, published an essay in which he predicted the development of a new kind of computing machine he called Memex. Today, computers in millions of offices and homes perform tasks that closely resemble the ideas that Bush proposed. For many people in the fields of computer and information science, Bush's Memex has been the prototype of the personal computer, and the first design for a machine to help people think and manage information. Yet, with all its renown, Memex is largely misunderstood. In From Memex to Hypertext, all of Bush's writings about Memex have been collected for the first time. Surrounding Bush's essays are chapters by historians and leading figures in the computer science research community telling the story of how the idea of Memex was developed and how Bush's writings have influenced today's research agenda in hypertext, multimedia, and artificial intelligence.