As We May Think
Vannevar Bush, 1945
An essay that imagined the web before any general-purpose electronic computer was running, written in the last months of a war that had reorganized all of science toward destruction. Bush was asking what science should do next.
What Bush Saw
Bush had spent the war directing the US Office of Scientific Research and Development — the agency that coordinated radar, sonar, the Manhattan Project, and dozens of other wartime programs. He understood, better than almost anyone, how scientific knowledge was produced and how poorly it was organized.
“The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate,” he wrote, “and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.”
The problem wasn’t production. Science could already publish more than anyone could read. The bottleneck was navigation — retrieval, connection, the ability to find and relate ideas across the vast accumulation of what was already known.
The Memex
Bush proposed the memex: a desk-sized device that stores all of a person’s books, records, and communications, and allows “associative indexing” — linking any item to any other item, creating trails through knowledge that can be saved, named, and followed later or shared with others.
“The human mind… operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. … Selection by association, rather than by indexing, may yet be mechanized.”
This was 1945. Bush was describing hypertext — twenty years before Ted Nelson coined the term, forty-five years before Tim Berners-Lee built the web. He was also describing something the web has still mostly failed to deliver: persistent associative trails, annotation of primary sources, knowledge that accumulates through use and becomes a resource for others.
What Followed
Douglas Engelbart read this essay as a young Navy radar technician at the end of the war and spent the next five decades trying to build what Bush described. The “Mother of All Demos” (1968) was a partial realization. Hypertext systems, wikis, and eventually the web were further partial realizations.
But something in Bush’s vision hasn’t been built yet. The memex wasn’t a search engine — it was a personal knowledge environment where connections made by a specific person over a specific lifetime of inquiry were preserved and navigable. The trails a researcher builds through a subject area carry that researcher’s judgment, experience, and pattern recognition. Making those trails shareable was Bush’s proposal; it’s still mostly unrealized.
Connections
- Douglas Engelbart — whose career began with this essay
- local-first — knowledge that lives where the work happens
- pattern-language — structured connections that carry meaning
- carrier-bag-theory — gathering and arrangement over conquest
- maintenance — knowledge systems require ongoing care
- embodied-knowledge — the trails that accumulate through practice
Source
Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic, July 1945.