Bush's Vision

Memex, as envisioned by Bush, is a desk containing large amounts of compressed information. The Memex user sits at the desk rapidly accessing information by operating a board of levers and buttons. The desired information appears on translucent screens propped on the desktop. Bush imagines that the rapidly advancing technology of computing will help develop the Memex or a similar information system. He was one of the few scientists of the era who envisioned computers as having applications beyond mathematical computations.

Bush's Memex machine would be a way of harnessing the information explosion enabling people to share resources at the touch of a few buttons. His 1945 article, As We May Think, inspired several attempts to build a Memex machine during the following two decades, but technology was neither sophisticated not inexpensive enough to allow any success. However, Bush's work remained important until the 1960s, influencing Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart, two pioneers in the development of hypertext systems.