Memex
The "Memex" was an influential imaginary machine discussed in a famous article called "As We May Think" written by an American scientist called Vannevar Bush in 1945. In many ways it foresaw and even inspired the invention of the web.
He imagined a machine that contained all your information, encyclopedias and other documents in chunks. Everything would be easily accessible. As a user, you could add notes in the margins and string chunks together to express some knowledge. These were called "associative trails" and the idea was that you could share them. Other people could insert them into their own Memex, and then they could explore and develop that knowledge too.
Similar to wiki pages really, the point was that the evolutionary flow was bottom-up. He saw them as tools for thought, maybe in particular collective thought, which made perfect sense from the point of a view a physicist looking forward to the end of WW2.
As many people have pointed out (e.g. [1]), in lots of ways, we're still catching up with this vision. What seems especially prescient now is that the emphasis was not so much on the quantity of information available, but on finding the connections in it. That is very much how knowledge tends to develop.
See also Artificial Intelligence and Related Pages.
