Classic essay by Vannevar Bush - shared bookmarks predicted in 1945 Oddly prescient, this essay by the father of the U.S. National Science Foundation is deservedly a classic. He speculates about a yet-to-be-invented machine which he calls a "memex" and describes it in a way which sounds a lot like a personal computer. Missing from the picture, but easy to imagine, is the Internet. But the image of scientists making "trails" of annotations and sharing them with each other is closely matched by ... surfers collecting bookmarks, tagging them using ad hoc tags, and sharing them via the internet. The stuff about the "memex" is only towards the end - skip to section 5 if you find the first pages boring. As is my habit, I have linked to the "printer friendly" version of the article. The authoritative location is . There are also various more or less legitimate copies all over the net. Oh, he misspelled "Hollerith". Sorry, couldn't resist noticing.