Vannevar Bush

Vannevar Bush, a Dean for the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT, was first to advocate the original concept of what we now call hypertext. In his groundbreaking article, "As We May Think," published in Atlantic Monthly in 1945, he discussed the concept of developing a computing machine that would organize information in a nonlinear environment. Kommers notes Bush focused on the growing problem of "enormous quantities of available information created by colleagues, which would cost researchers years and years to search for relevant ideas" (4). Bush envisioned a personalized information base that would store all a person's books, journals, and communication. He called the system Memex, where records can be "indexed using a limited set of key words" (Kommers 4). Bush's notion was the initial concept for hypertext environments.

The theoretical Memex used the metaphor of a desk to help organize, store, and retrieve files.

Click on the picture to get a better view and explanation of the system.