Summary
Published in The Atlantic in July 1945, Vannevar Bush’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’s Augmenting Human Intellect explicitly re-examined Bush’s vision, placing As We May Think at the head of the lineage that runs through Licklider to the Independent Internet. Karpathy’s LLM Wiki essay frames the LLM-maintained wiki 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.
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