Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) was an American engineer who, as director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, coordinated American science during the Second World War. He is remembered here for a single essay.
Key work in the library
- As We May Think (1945) — the essay introducing the Memex, a personal device for storing one’s records and building associative trails between them.
Significance
The Memex is the headwater of the entire lineage in the overview: Engelbart’s Augmenting Human Intellect re-examined it directly, and it precedes Licklider’s 1960 work by fifteen years. Its emphasis on private, actively curated knowledge with the links between documents as valuable as the documents themselves anticipates both hypertext and the LLM-maintained wiki.