In July 1945 The Atlantic Monthly published “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush, who had directed the United States Office of Scientific Research and Development during the war. Writing as the conflict ended, Bush asked what scientists should turn to next, and argued that the great unfinished task was making the world’s growing store of knowledge accessible rather than letting it pile up faster than anyone could use it.
The essay’s central proposal is a device Bush called the memex. He described it as a future machine for individual use, a kind of mechanized private file and library in which a person could store books, records, and communications and retrieve them quickly. Its defining feature was associative indexing: the user could build trails of linked items, so that any piece of information could be tied to related pieces and the whole web of connections recalled later. This is widely recognized as an early description of what later became hypertext and the linked structure of the web.
Bush grounded the idea in the technologies of his day, microfilm, photocells, and the like, but the deeper insight was about augmenting human memory and thought rather than replacing them. He saw machines taking over the repetitive parts of intellectual work so that people could spend their effort on creative thinking.
The essay became a touchstone for later pioneers of personal computing, hypertext, and human computer interaction, and it remains a reference point for systems that help people find and connect information. The version cited here is the full reproduction of the July 1945 Atlantic article hosted by MIT.