Memex

Overview

Proposed by Vannevar Bush in “As We May Think” (1945). A hypothetical device for storing, annotating, and linking personal knowledge — books, records, communications — with “associative trails” between documents.

Relevance

Bush’s vision was private, curated, with connections as valuable as the documents themselves. This is closer to the LLM wiki pattern than what the web became (public, uncurated, links as navigation not knowledge).

The missing piece Bush couldn’t solve: who does the maintenance? The LLM handles that. (Karpathy)

Connections