A work in progress. A world of connections.
Good ideas
deserve good
company.
A thought in a notebook. A link worth keeping. Something you almost forgot. What if they could find each other?
We’re making a home for knowledge — and the unexpected connections between it.
A note from the workshopNothing exists
all by itself.
Oh, this reminds
me of something.
Keep this.
For someday.
Something new,
between the lines.
Not quite ready. Very much alive.
We’re still connecting the dots.
memex is taking shape. There are ideas on the table, things to try, and a lot of notes in the margins. We’ll open the doors when it feels right.
CURIOSITY
A thread worth following
An idea with a long memory.
Our name began with an imagined desk. The idea behind it reaches a little further: knowledge is not only what we keep, but how we connect it.
It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
A few stops along the way. Not a straight line, and not the whole story.
1945 / Vannevar Bush / As We May Think
A desk for the mind.
Bush imagines the Memex: a personal library of books, notes, and correspondence, stored on microfilm. Never built as described, but radical in its purpose: follow associations, annotate what you find, and pass those trails to someone else.
Read the original essay1965 / Ted Nelson / Hypertext
Writing can branch.
Nelson publishes the term “hypertext” for writing that need not follow a single sequence. A document can open into another; a reader can choose a path. The connections become part of the writing itself.
Follow Nelson’s thread1968 / Douglas Engelbart & team / NLS
Think together.
In a live demonstration, Engelbart and his team show linked documents, shared editing, and remote collaboration. The computer becomes a place to work through ideas with other people, not just a machine for calculations.
Visit the demonstration1989 / Tim Berners-Lee / The Web
Let the links travel.
At CERN, Berners-Lee proposes a way to connect information across computers using hypertext. The Web takes shape: documents can belong to different people, in different places, and still point to one another.
Explore the Web’s beginningsNow / Here in the workshop / memex
An old question. An open chapter.
We have more information than Bush could have imagined. Finding it is not the same as making sense of it. This little project starts with his question: how might our tools help us remember, connect, and share what we know?
Back to the workbench