The ‘Memex’ machine and ‘hypertext’

Hypertext is highlighted words or images on the Internet, that when clicked on opens a trail of linked information. Hypertext is images, text and music.
Vannevar Bush created the idea of hypertext in 1945. In the book ”As We May Think” he described a machine that used hypertext. We see that hypertext is not a new term, when looking at how long the World Wide Web has existed.
The hypertext machine was called ‘Memex’. This was a machine that you could store information. Like a library, and link the information you wanted together, creating a new collection of information. So could the ‘Memex’ machine be called a computer?

When creating the ‘Memex’ machine he took inspiration from how the human brain functioned. You could say that the brain is the world’s first computer. He wanted to create a more logical way to store information. In ‘As we may think’ Bush describe the machine like this, “A memex is a device in witch an individual stores all his books, records and communications, and which an individual mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory”.
So there are strong lings between Bush’s ‘Memex’ machine and today’s modern computers. It is a place to store information and that hypertext is an important tool in that to read on the World Wide Web. Thanks to hypertext it has become more easily to retrieve information. The use of hypertext is still developing making the web more effective.