1890 Everett [USA] † 1974

He is best known for his ideal of the Memex (MEMory indEX), a mechanical storage device for books, recordings, and communications, with very simple, fast, and non-linear searches; the Memex was never developed, but it inspired the work of his successors, Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and later, Tim Berners Lee.

Bush wanted the memex to emulate the way the brain links data by association rather than through traditional, hierarchical indexes and storage paradigms, and to be easily accessible as "a future device for individual use... a kind of mechanized private archives and library" in the form of a desktop.

After pondering the potential of augmented memory for several years, Bush expounded at length on his thoughts in "As We Might Think," predicting that "entirely new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready with a mesh of associative paths crisscrossing them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified."

Shortly after "As We Might Think" was published, Douglas Engelbart read it, and with Bush's visions in mind, began the work that would later lead to the invention of the mouse. Ted Nelson, who coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia," was also greatly influenced by Bush's essay.