As We May Think by VANNEVAR BUSH First Edition The Atlantic, July 1945

  

First appearance of the seminal essay on computing technology "As We May Think". Concord, NH: The Atlantic Monthly Company, 1945. First appearance of the foundational essay "As We May Think" by the engineering giant Vannevar Bush, in the July 1945 newsstand issue of The Atlantic magazine. Bound in publisher's printed wraps.

Near Fine with light wear to covers, trivial foxing to covers and textblock edges, and chip to lower corner of pp. Vannevar Bush's visionary essay both anticipated and influenced the development of the personal computer. The wartime head of military research and development saw the need to record and systematize knowledge in a new way: A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted. " The solution he imagined was the "Memex, a machine controlled by a control card or film that used a new symbolic language to perform complex mathematical calculations at high speed. It would hold libraries worth of easily searchable books or materials that could be opened simultaneously on one screen and linked together to create a web of related information.

Bush's vision strongly influenced the hypertext developers Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart, as well as the World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee. All of them were the heirs of a man who insisted that man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems.