The concept of hypertext and a memory extension originates from an article that was published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945 written by Vannevar Bush, titled As We May Think. Within this article Vannevar urged scientists to work together to help build a body of knowledge for all mankind. He then proposed the idea of a virtually limitless, fast, reliable, extensible, associative memory storage and retrieval system. He named this device a memex.
Bush regarded the notion of “associative indexing” as his key conceptual contribution. As he explained, this was “a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex.
The process of tying two items together is the important thing.” This “linking” (as we now say) constituted a “trail” of documents that could be named, coded, and found again. Moreover, after the original two items were coupled, “numerous items” could be “joined together to form a trail”; they could be “reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book”