Vannevar Bush wrote about a hypothetical information device called the memex in his 1945 essay “As We May Think.”

The memex was imagined as a desk-like machine that could store an individual’s books, records, and communications on microfilm and let them be consulted with great speed and flexibility. Bush described it as an “enlarged intimate supplement” to human memory, where a person could create associative “trails” linking documents together, a concept that foreshadowed modern hypertext and aspects of the internet.