As We May Think

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Vannevar Bush's essay As We May Think, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, argued that as humans turned from war, scientific efforts should shift from increasing physical abilities to making all previous collected human knowledge more accessible.

The article was a reworked and expanded version of his 1939 Mechanization and the Record. The system, which he called memex, was described as based on what was thought, at the time, to be the wave of the future: Ultra high resolution microfilm reels, coupled to multiple screen viewers and cameras, by electromechanical controls. The Atlantic Monthly article was followed, in November 1945, by a Life magazine article which showed illustrations of the proposed memex desk and automatic typewriter.

As We May Think predicted many kinds of technology invented after its publication, including hypertext, personal computers, the Internet, the World Wide Web, speech recognition, and online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia: "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."