Vannevar Bush's Memex
Vannevar Bush, who is generally credited with the idea of hypertext (though not the term itself) developed his idea of a Memex, or memory extender, sometime in the 1930s and published it in his seminal 1945 article, "As We May Think." Nelson and many subsequent writers on hypertext see it chiefly as atomized text, which includes images and other forms of data, joined by links. Bush, in contrast, emphasizes paths and trails of links as a new form of writing imposed upon existing print-based texts. Drawing upon both Bush and Nelson, therefore, I propose the following definition . . .
