The original idea for the world wide web emerged in a flurry of scientific thought around the end of World War II. It began with a hypothetical machine called the “memex”, proposed by US Office of Scientific Research and Development head Vannevar Bush in an article entitled As We May Think, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945.
The memex would help us access all knowledge, instantaneously and from our desks. It had a searchable index, and documents were linked together by the “trails” made by users when they associated one document with another. Bush imagined the memex using microfiche and photography, but conceptually it was almost the modern internet.
