Vannevar Bush: Hypertext Prophet

Vannevar Bush is an unlikely cyberculture hero. After all, he was F.D.R.’s World War II science czar, organized the Manhattan Project and helped create the postwar military-industrial-university complex. But the onetime professor at M.I.T.–where he built a massive, gear-driven analog computer called the differential analyzer–was also a prophet. In 1945, dismayed by the wartime info overload, he proposed a desktop machine, the “memex,” that would display text and pictures (from a microfilm library) at the press of a button. Presciently, Bush envisioned users of his proto-PC following trails of knowledge along storable hypertext “links,” much like today’s Web surfers.

–By Frederic Golden