The Memex Has Been Waiting 80 Years for This Moment

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In July 1945, an engineer named Vannevar Bush published an essay in The Atlantic called “As We May Think.” It is one of the strangest, most hopeful documents I know.

Bush had spent the war as the director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development. He oversaw the entire American scientific war effort — radar, the proximity fuse, penicillin manufacturing, and, indirectly, the work that would end the war the same month his essay was published. The atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Bush’s essay came out a few weeks earlier. He could feel what was coming. He wrote the essay anyway, and what he wrote was not a triumphal account of what science had done. It was a quiet, almost embarrassed argument that the same instruments scientists had built for destruction could be turned, just as easily, toward the preservation of human knowledge.

Founder Story on Thede Technologies

The Memex Has Been Waiting 80 Years for This Moment