'''''As We May Think''''' is an essay by [[Vannevar Bush]], first published in ''[[The Atlantic Monthly]]'' in July 1945. Bush argued that as humans turned from war, scientific efforts should shift from increasing physical abilities to making all previous collected [[human]] [[knowledge]] more accessible.

The article was a reworked and expanded version of his 1939 ''Mechanization and the Record''. The system, which he called [[memex]], was described as based on what was thought, at the time, to be the wave of the future: Ultra high resolution [[microfilm]] reels, coupled to multiple screen viewers and cameras, by electromechanical controls. The ''Atlantic Monthly'' article was followed, in November 1945, by a [[Life magazine]] article which showed illustrations of the proposed memex desk and automatic typewriter.

''As We May Think'' predicted many kinds of technology invented after its publication, including [[hypertext]], [[personal computers]], the [[Internet]], the [[World Wide Web]], [[speech recognition]], and [[online encyclopedia]]s 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."

==See also==
* [[Timeline of hypertext technology]]
* [[Memex]]
* [[Hypertext]]

==External links==
*[http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/html/info/vannevar_bush.html "As We May Think" - A Celebration of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Vision, at Brown University]

===Online versions===
*[http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush ''As we may think'' from the ''Atlantic Monthly'' archives]
* Authorized mirrors of ''As we may think'' at [http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/~duchier/pub/vbush/vbush-all.shtml Saarland University] and [http://www.cs.sfu.ca/CC/365/mark/material/notes/Chap1/VBushArticle/ Simon Fraser University]

[[Category:Futurology]]
[[Category:Essays]]
[[Category:1945 works]]
[[Category:Library and information science]]
[[Category:History of computing]]

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