[blasdel]

When people write papers about New Media and The Web, they often cite Vannevar Bush's 1945 article in The Atlantic, “As We May Think”. We had a 65th anniversary panel about the paper at Hypertext 2010, at which I was the designated heretic. My position is that Bush’s paper is essentially a popular science article. It gets some things right, some wrong. It’s cavalier about its sources – especially the very important work of Emanuel Goldberg, which Bush knew and which was entirely forgotten by everyone in the field for fifty years before Michael Buckland rediscovered it.

We can point to other precursors, too. H. G. Wells, for example, wrote The World Brain before the War and tried hard to fund a foundation that would manage an open-source microfilm encyclopedia of the world’s knowledge. But the really astonishing prediction is not Bush’s but Murray Leinster’s 1946 short story, “A Logic Name Joe”…

http://www.markbernstein.org/Jul10/ALogicNamedJoe.html

[jacquesm]

That's interesting stuff that I didn't have a clue about, thank you.

How do you know Bush was aware of Goldbergs work ?

[eastgate]

a) Goldberg said he met with Bush and told him about it. b) Bush had a patent application denied because of Goldberg's prior art.