Dr. Vannevar Bush was the science adviser of president Roosevelt during World War II and the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in the USA. In July 1945 he published an article with the title "As We May Think" in the Atlantic Monthly. In this article he pointed out, that the human mind works associative and that the cells of the brain are linked by trials. In the years after World War II the amount of scientific literature and the difficulties to find specific information in books increased dramatically. As a consequence Dr. Bush took his theories about how human memory works, to describe the concept of a system called Memex. This system would store large amount of information (books, pictures, newspaper, business correspondence, etc.) on Microfilm and would make the search process much easier. In his description Dr. Bush suggested a keyboard and a scanner for information input, compression and mass storage of the collected material, personal links for navigation and displays for information output. This concept was revolutionary in a time where sophisticated data processing systems or even transistors did not exist. Because Dr. Bush's concept included already the most important components of today's hypertext systems, Dr. Bush can be seen as the inventor of the hypermedia technology.
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