Editing Memex (section)

{{Short description|Hypothetical proto-hypertext system that was first described by Vannevar Bush in 1945}}
{{for |the software company|Memex Technology Limited}}
[[File:Vannevar Bush portrait.jpg|thumb|Vannevar Bush]]

A '''memex''' (from "'''mem'''ory '''ex'''pansion") is a hypothetical electromechanical device for interacting with [[microform]] documents and described in [[Vannevar Bush]]'s 1945 article "[[As We May Think]]". Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which individuals would compress and store all of their books, records, and communications, "mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility". The individual was supposed to use the memex as an automatic personal [[Filing cabinet|filing system]], making the memex "an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory".<ref name="ReferenceA">{{Cite book |last=Montfort |first=Nick |title=The New Media Reader |date=2003 |publisher=MIT Press |isbn=9780262232272 |pages=135}}.</ref>

The concept of the memex influenced the development of early [[hypertext]] systems and [[personal knowledge base]] software.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Davies |first=Stephen |date=February 2011 |title=Still Building The Memex |volume=54 |issue=2 |pages=80–88 |doi=10.1145/1897816.1897840 |journal=Communications of the ACM|s2cid=9551946 }}.</ref> The hypothetical implementation depicted by Bush for the purpose of concrete illustration was based upon a document bookmark list of static [[microfilm]] pages and lacked a true hypertext system, where parts of pages would have internal structure beyond the common textual format.