Architect of Associations
An engineer who imagined a desk where knowledge could be joined into trails. His memex gave the wandering mind a machine to think with.
Engineer & Imaginer of the Memex
Bush’s work at MIT included the differential analyzer, a mechanical approach to solving differential equations. Claude Shannon worked with the machine as a graduate student.
The connection is a useful reminder that computing’s history contains many forms of machinery. Bush’s later writing would ask what an instrument might do for the person working through a body of knowledge.
As We May Think introduces the memex, an imagined personal device for records and associative trails. Bush describes readers joining materials, annotating them and passing useful paths to other people.
Try the idea while reading: follow a reference, save the connection, and explain why it mattered. The trail carries something of the reader’s thinking alongside the documents.
Bush also delivered Science, the Endless Frontier, a report arguing for continued public support of scientific research after the Second World War. The report became central to discussions that led to the US National Science Foundation.
These two works operate at different scales: a desk that supports inquiry, and institutions that help make inquiry possible. Read them together for a fuller view of his ambition.
1945 · Vannevar Bush · Reprinted at Carnegie Mellon
The imagined memex and its trails through a person’s books, records and ideas.Read the essay1945 · Vannevar Bush · NSF anniversary edition
A proposal for supporting scientific research after the war.Read the PDFVannevar Bush · Revisiting the associative information machine
Read PDF1931 · Vannevar Bush · Original engineering paper
View the paper1936 · Vannevar Bush · American Mathematical Society
Read the paper1929 · Vannevar Bush · Reprinted in The Essential Writings
Read the work1932 · Vannevar Bush · Reprinted in The Essential Writings
Read the work
Claude ShannonA direct connection through the differential analyzer at MIT
Douglas EngelbartContinue from associative trails to a working augmentation system