The granddaddy of them all?

As We May Think (1945) (available all over the web) was probably the first article to examine the possibilities of hypertext. It has been reprinted and footnoted almost countless times, and its basic ideas have become so incorporated into mainstream thought that even a moderately experienced web surfer would find it difficult to get excited over it. Bush envisioned his memex as a highly personal machine, a means by which he would be able to create connections between different and not necessarily related texts that were at his disposal. The end result was a network, but not one that he intended to make public, but instead to utilize for his own needs.

The question of why we might want to make our own private networks available to others, or to construct our own networks by connecting to those of others that have been made public, wasn't (yet?) part of Bush's vision. Just as Bolter wrote about hypertext before the World Wide Web, Bush wrote of hypertext before the computer made it possible, and despite his ample prophetic capabilities, the vision of interconnecting between personal networks was a very hard one to which to jump. With all due respect to Bush (and no bibliography on the subject is complete without referring to him) the objectives of this particular project seem to have less in common with his memex than to the personal web pages of high school students who link to the web sites of their favorite bands.

Go to: Prove you're not making all this up