As We May Think

Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay, named across two of Kyle’s book pages as a hinge between the wartime laboratory and the modern internet. Reinventing Knowledge — From Alexandria To The Internet places it in the lineage that produced the networked universal library: among those inspired by the essay were Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, and J.C.R. Licklider, whose Libraries of the Future (1965) described a digitized, networked library able to learn from and adapt to its users’ queries.

Boom — Bubbles & The End of Stagnation reads the same essay as a “prescient” vision of a networked world where documents lived on microfilm rather than paper — a prophecy that anticipated the mid-1960s enthusiasm for computer stocks and helped shape the work that would later happen at Xerox PARC. Both framings treat the essay as a foundational forecast of associative, machine-assisted knowledge work. (The full treatment of Bush as a figure — MIT engineering dean, Claude Shannon’s advisor, and essayist — lives on the Vannevar Bush page.)

Context: “As We May Think” was published in The Atlantic in July 1945, near the end of Bush’s tenure directing US wartime science. It described the “memex,” a hypothetical desk-based machine that would store and associatively link a user’s books, records, and communications — an idea widely cited as an intellectual ancestor of hypertext and the World Wide Web.

Where this appears

• Reinventing Knowledge — From Alexandria To The Internet — the essay’s lineage to Engelbart and Licklider’s networked, self-adapting library.
• Boom — Bubbles & The End of Stagnation — the 1945 essay framed as a “prescient,” PARC-shaping prophecy of a microfilm-stored, networked world.