Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which individuals would compress and store all of their books, records, and communications, " mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.

" The memex would provide an " enlarged intimate supplement to one's memory ".

The top of the memex would have a transparent platen.

When a longhand note, photograph, memoranda, or other things were placed on the platen, the depression of a lever would cause the item to be photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film.

The memex proposed by Bush would create trails of links connecting sequences of microfilm frames, rather than links in the modern sense where a hyperlink connects a single word, phrase or picture within a document and a local or remote destination.

The memex would have features other than linking.

Considered together, these memex machines were probably the earliest practical description of what we would call today the Office of the future.

Each society would maintain a ' master memex ' containing all papers, references, tables " intimately interconnected by trails, so that one may follow a detailed matter from paper to paper, going back through the classics, recording criticism in the margins.

In " As We May Think ," Bush describes a memex as an electromechanical device enabling individuals to develop and read a large self-contained research library, create and follow associative trails of links and personal annotations, and recall these trails at any time to share them with other researchers.

The memex ( a portmanteau of " memory " and " index ") is the name of the hypothetical proto-hypertext system that Vannevar Bush described in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article " As We May Think " ( AWMT ).

Bush describes the memex and other visions of " As We May Think " as projections of technology known in the 1930s and 1940s in the spirit of Jules Verne or Arthur C. Clarke's 1945 proposal to orbit geosynchronous satellites for global telecommunication.

The supervisor had just seen a demonstration of the World Wide Web and suggested it could be improved and better conformed to the memex described by Vannevar Bush if links did not have to be manually inserted and instead one could follow a link simply by using the words themselves.

Michael Buckland, in an article published in 1992, suggested that the memex was severely flawed because Bush did not thoroughly understand information science and had a bad opinion of indices and classification schemes: " Bush thought that the creation of arbitrary associations between individual records was the basis of memory, so he wanted ' mem ( ory -) ex ', or ' Memex instead of index '.

Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974 ) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator known for his work on analog computers, for his role as an initiator and administrator of the Manhattan Project, for founding Raytheon, and for the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer with a structure analogous to that of the World Wide Web.

In 1945, Bush published As We May Think in which he predicted that " wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified ".

In 1945, Vannevar Bush described a hypertext-like device called the " memex " in his The Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think.

In offline version, machine improvisation can be used to achieve style mixing, an approach inspired by Vannevar Bush's memex imaginary machine.

The concept of the memex influenced the development of early hypertext systems ( eventually leading to the creation of the World Wide Web ) and personal knowledge base software.

The vision of the memex predates, and is credited as the inspiration for, the first practical hypertext systems of the 1960s.

" A user could also create a copy of an interesting trail ( containing references and personal annotations ) and "... pass it to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into the more general trail.

" As observers like Tim Oren have pointed out, the memex could be considered to be a microfilm-based precursor to the personal computer.

" Given a memex, a scholar could create her own knowledge tools as connections within reams of information, share these tools, and use complexes of tools to create yet more sophisticated knowledge that could in turn be deployed toward this work.

The memex has been envisioned as a means of turning an information explosion into a knowledge explosion.

Bush's idea for the memex extended far beyond a mechanism which might augment the research of one individual working in isolation.

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.

As We May Think also predicted many kinds of technology invented after its publication in addition to hypertext such as personal computers, the Internet, the World Wide Web, speech recognition, and online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia: " Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.

The memex influenced generations of computer scientists, who drew inspiration from its vision of the future.

When she would do these things, he would turn blind for an instant and become sick at his stomach.

She would look at Jack, with that hidden something in her eyes, and Jack would see the Woman and become breathless and a little sick.

Unanimously they believe that the world would become a safer place if more of us -- and more Russians and Communist Chinese, too -- thought about accidental war.

If he had been `` liquidated '' in some way, he would have become a martyr, a rallying point for people who shared his ideas.

Paula says that even though Carl's letters usually began, `` Dear Miss Steichen '', there was an understanding from the beginning that they would become husband and wife.

The contents of this 195-page document would become known to many before it would become known to the man it was written about.

When the family business failed, Mercer left school and on his mother's urging -- for she hoped that he would become an actor -- he joined a local little theater group.

The wool would become frazzled around the edges from blowing in the wind, and Mama would mend it.

If she wanted to borrow any sum of money in expecting the arrangements of Congress, it would not become a stranger, unknown to her, to offer himself for that purpose.

All false gods resemble Moloch, at least in the early phases of their careers, so it would be unreasonable to expect any form of idol-worship to become widespread without the accompaniment of human sacrifice.

Then, to conclude on an indeterminate note: `` Nevertheless, if fallout increased substantially, or remained high for a long time, it would become far more important as a potential health hazard in this country and throughout the world ''.

Only afterwards did an act like that become meaningless, so that he would puzzle over it for days, whereas at the time it had seemed quite real.

And listening to such a conversation one morning while taking a cup of chocolate in a cafe, Rousseau found himself bathed in perspiration, trembling lest his authorship become known, and at the same time dreaming of the startling effect he would make if he should proclaim himself suddenly as the composer.

Monsieur Favre's threat would become a reality, for he continued to proclaim loudly that the city must rid itself of `` that Frenchman ''.

They caused my love for Jessica to become warmer and at the same time more hopeless, as if my adolescent self knew that only torment would ever bring me the courage to ask to see her again.

Considering the high cost of the F-108 system -- over $4 billion for the force that had been planned -- and the time period in which it would become operational, it was decided to stop further work on the project.

This aircraft, which was planned for initial operational use about 1965, would be complementary to but likewise competitive with the four strategic ballistic missile systems, all of which are scheduled to become available earlier.

This part of the equation would then become 4.

But it would also be a mistake for them not to realize how comfortable camping has become.