In his 1945 Atlantic Monthly article, “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush described an idea he called the memex:
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory. (106)Bush’s memex was to be a microfilm-based document filing system that would allow users to store, retrieve, and annotate documents, but Bush’s most innovative and influential proposal was to enable users to link documents together through a nonhierarchical, associational logic. Bush referred to “associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another” (107). In Bush’s memex, associational indexing (i.e., linking across texts) was to supplant hierarchical indexing, and, although the memex was never built, the concept of associational indexing was eventually embodied in hypertext.