# As We May Think

Vannevar Bush's wartime essay imagining the Memex — a personal device for storing and associatively linking all of one's books, records, and communications.

## Summary

Published in *The Atlantic* in July 1945, [Vannevar Bush](/wiki/vannevar-bush.md)'s essay argued that the great task after the war was making the growing record of human knowledge usable. His proposed device, the **Memex**, would let an individual store all their books and notes and — crucially — build *associative trails* linking one item to another, mimicking how the mind jumps by association rather than rigid index.

## Why it matters

The Memex is the conceptual seed of hypertext and the personal knowledge base. [Engelbart](/wiki/engelbart.md)'s [Augmenting Human Intellect](/docs/augmenting-human-intellect.md) explicitly re-examined Bush's vision, placing *As We May Think* at the head of the lineage that runs through [Licklider](/wiki/licklider.md) to the Independent Internet. Karpathy's [LLM Wiki](/docs/llm-wiki.md) essay frames the [LLM-maintained wiki](/wiki/llm-maintained-wiki.md) as Memex finally realized — the connections between documents as valuable as the documents themselves. This is a copyrighted essay; only an original summary and the canonical link are kept here.

> Part of the AP0110.ORG source library. See the [wiki overview](/wiki.md).

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## Backlinks

Pages that link here:

- [Compounding Knowledge vs. Retrieval](/wiki/compounding-knowledge-vs-rag.md) — Why an LLM-maintained wiki accumulates understanding where retrieval-augmented generation re-derives it on every query.
- [Vannevar Bush](/wiki/vannevar-bush.md) — Engineer and wartime science administrator whose 1945 essay imagined the Memex, the conceptual seed of hypertext and the personal knowledge base.