Vannevar Bush and the Memex

In his 1945 essay “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush proposed the Memex — a hypothetical device for storing, retrieving, and linking personal knowledge. The Memex was a desk-sized machine where a user could store all their books, records, and communications, and build associative trails between documents — personal paths through the material that could be shared with others.

Key properties

• Private and personal — not a shared public system, but an individual’s curated store
• Actively maintained — the user builds and refines trails over time
• Connections as valuable as documents — the associative trails are the real product

Relationship to modern systems

Bush’s vision is often cited as a precursor to hypertext and the World Wide Web, but the web diverged significantly: it became public, decentralized, and largely unmaintained at the individual level.

The LLM Wiki Pattern proposed by Andrej Karpathy is closer to Bush’s original vision than the web. It is private, actively curated, with connections maintained systematically. The missing piece Bush couldn’t solve — who does the ongoing maintenance — is addressed by LLMs, which handle the bookkeeping of cross-referencing and keeping the knowledge store current.