War stimulates scientific research. Vennevar Bush was President Roosevelt`s top advisor on matters of technology in the Second World War, and one of the pioneers of US radar research. In 1945, he speculated that one day, it would be possible to sit down at a desk or machine that would house or access all human knowledge. He called this machine a memex, a portmanteau of "memory" and "extender" or "memory" and "index", and described it as desk and camera combination that could record anything a user wrote, and then link it to other pieces of information indexed in its storage space. This essay prefigured hypertext, the personal computer, the Internet, the World Wide Web, speech recognition and online encyclopedias.1
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