---
title: "Memex"
chunk: 2/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:36:58.676263+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. ...
The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail that stops only on the salient items and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trailblazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected. — As We May Think 

== Legacy ==
Bush said of his "As We May Think" memex device that "technical difficulties of all sorts have been ignored," but that, "also ignored are means as yet unknown which may come any day to accelerate technical progress as violently as did the advent of the thermionic tube." Michael Buckland concluded that Bush's 1945 vision for an information retrieval machine is unhistorically viewed in relation to the subsequent development of electronic computer technology. Buckland studied the historical background of information retrieval in and before 1939 because the Memex was based on Bush's work during 1938–1940 in building a photoelectric microfilm selector, an electronic retrieval technology invented by Emanuel Goldberg for Zeiss Ikon in the 1920s. According to Buckland, the legacy of Bush is twofold: a significant engineering achievement in building a rapid prototype microfilm selector, and "a speculative article" which through "the social prestige of its author, has had an immediate and lasting effect in stimulating others."
The pioneer of human–computer interaction Douglas Engelbart was inspired by Bush's proposal for a co-evolution between humans and machines. In a 1999 publication, Engelbart recollects that reading "As We May Think" in 1945 he "became 'infected' with the idea of building a means to extend and navigate this great pool of human knowledge". Around 1961, Engelbart re-read Bush's article, and from 1962 onward Engelbart developed a series of technical designs. Engelbart updated the Memex microfilm storage desk and thereby arrived at a pioneering vision for a personal computer connected to an electronic visual display and a mouse pointing device. In 1962, Engelbart sent Bush a draft article for comment; Bush never replied. The article was published in 1963 under the title "A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man's Intellect".

In 1965, J. C. R. Licklider dedicated his book Libraries of the Future to Bush. Licklider wrote that he had often heard of the memex and "trails of reference", even before he had read "As We May Think". Also in 1965, Ted Nelson coined the word "hypertext" in a paper that quoted Bush's memex idea at length.  Nelson collaborated with Andries van Dam to implement the Hypertext Editing System (HES) in 1968. Nelson later defined hypertext as "non-sequential writing with reader-controlled links" in his 1987 book Literary Machines. Without prior knowledge of the ideas developed by Bush, Engelbart, and Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee built his ENQUIRE software at CERN in 1980. However, as Berners-Lee began to refine his ideas, the work of these predecessors would later help to confirm the legitimacy of his endeavor, which led to his invention of the World Wide Web in 1989. In 2003, Microsoft promoted a life-logging research project under the name MyLifeBits as an attempt to fulfill Bush's memex vision.

== 1959 Memex II ==
In 1959, Vannevar Bush described an improved "Memex II". In the manuscript draft of "Memex II" he wrote, "Professional societies will no longer print papers..." and states that individuals will either order sets of papers to come on tape – complete with photographs and diagrams – or download 'facsimiles' by telephone. Each society would maintain a 'master memex' containing all papers, references, tables "intimately interconnected by trails, so that one may follow a detailed matter from paper to paper, going back through the classics, recording criticism in the margins."