Origins & Computability · 1945
As We May Think (Memex) + Science the Endless Frontier
Bush proposed the Memex, an imagined desk-based device for storing documents and linking them by association, anticipating the idea of navigable connected information.
Editorial record
Plain-language summary
Bush described a hypothetical machine that would hold a person's books, records, and notes on microfilm and let the user create named 'trails' of associative links between items. He argued that organizing knowledge by association rather than rigid indexing would match how people actually think and recall. The essay is widely credited as an early inspiration for hypertext, personal information systems, and the linked structure of the web.
Knowledge graph
Relationships
Antecedents
EnablesEvidence: Strongly supported
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
Memex vision underlies retrieval/RAG
P-322
Source record
Provenance
- Record ID
- O-007
- Record created
- 2026-07-13
- Last reviewed
- 2026-07-14
- Record version
- 2
Citation caveat: Citation metadata is approximate and marked unverified in the source dataset.