"Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages."
"Will there be dry photography?"
"Often it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and to look at the picture immediately."

This piece is humbling. often we are searching for the new discovery, bent on being the first to conqure an idea or a field. This article from 1945 reminds us that we are not alone and that we have to pay homage to those that came before. There are tools to discovery everywhere and they merely need force more than individual genius to begin. Bush predicts so righty countless inventions with which he has no connection to the kind of technical programing they will require to work.
The memex is a topic of the library scientist. A machine to streamline research, to access a wealth of knowledge from a single location. We continue to live up to the exspectations of such a profit. Imagination is championed in this speech predicting the invention of the computer 50 years before it was how we know imagine.

July 1945 ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

"The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him."

http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/BUSH_BERRNIER.html