The genesis of the Internet started under rather inconspicuous origins. One of the sparks to develop it was first lit by Douglas Engelbart’s reading and mulling over of Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay, “As We May Think,” not a multilateral coalition of scientists. It was also not in a highly-esteemed lab that this was devised, but in the tiny village of Leyte in the Philippines.

While Engelbart, who died earlier this year, was stationed in the Philippines after the end of World War II, he read Bush’s essay as it was published in the September 1945 issue of Life, and considered his musings on a hypertext data-storage system that Bush called the “Memex.” Bush described the Memex as an electromechanical self-contained library. What this structure would consist of would have been electromechanical controls, microfilm cameras, microfilm and a storage disk on which people could store documents that they wanted to keep on the device permanently, although users could add documents they wanted or take away documents that they did not want to keep at will.

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Given that this was before computer chips, integrated circuits and was written a full two years before Bell Labs (News - Alert) developed the first transistor, this was a monumental leap in the idea of data storage via electromechanical and electronic means. Bush also predicted that each society could consolidate information and have a “master Memex,” adding in people’s own experiences and findings, and that societies could consolidate those into a record of the species. Bush talked about how the whole of an Encyclopedia Britannica could fit on an 8.5” x 11” sheet of paper, and how that could be stored on microfilm along with everything else. Bush hadn’t outlined much of a system for data classification and retrieval, or for a master search function, but the groundwork he had laid in the essay would definitely shape how Engelbart thought of it.