As We May Think

Concord NH: Rumsford Press, 1945. Original wrappers. Very Good. FIRST EDITION of Vannevar Bush's landmark paper credited for originating the idea of hypertext and, by extension, providing many of the theoretical underpinnings for the world wide web. "In a 1945 article entitled "As We May Think," published in the Atlantic Monthly, Bush proposed a device that he called the Memex-an indexed, archival, microfilm machine for cross-referencing and retrieving information. For Bush, this article was an extension of his work in analog computing and microfilm technology. To the modern reader it portends the creation of hypertext and the World Wide Web" (Britannica).

"Different people place the origins of the Internet at different times. The earliest accounts put it in the mind of Vannevar Bush, as long ago as 1945. Bush, the man who had played such a prominent role in the building of the atomic bomb, envisaged a machine that would allow the entire compendium of human knowledge to be 'accessed'" (Peter Watson, The Modern Mind). Bush's Memex device for storing and accessing vast quantities of information was the direct influence and inspiration for the later invention of hypertext by Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart (see Engelbart's classic 1962 paper, Augmenting Human Intellect).

IN: The Atlantic Monthly 176, no. 1 (July 1945), pp. 101-8. Rumsford Press, Concord, N.H., 1945. Quarto, original wrappers.The subscription issue (as opposed to the newstand issue). The subscription issue has several additional pages of ads, and an additional five pages of short reviews of new books and is presumed to have been issued before the newsstand issue. (The Bush article is identical in each issue.) Light, general wear. An outstanding copy. RARE.