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    Prehistory of the World Wide Web

  1. Vannevar Bush, science advisor to President Roosevelt, published an article in the July, 1945 issue of Atlantic Monthly entitled "As We May Think", a futurist's vision of developments in the process of thinking. He wrote:

    When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass.... The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.

  2. Bush invisioned a way for everyone to construct a personal library of information. With computers still several years ahead of him, Bush imagined a mechanical desk, called a "memex," that would allow its owner to store microfilm images of: 
    
	1) interesting books

	2) magazine

	3) and papers

    and to link them according to the user's whim -- in other words, the relationships between various sources of information, originally present only in the mind of the reader, could be captured, saved, and used again. This vision reflects a deep understanding of how information becomes knowledge: through experience, embodied as relationships among disparate data.
  3. this is number 3
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