Episode 2: Vannevar Bush WWII Visionary
Opening:
As we explore the origins of the internet, let’s take a step back from the ARPANET in 1957 and go back to a cool geek cleaning the mess after WWII in 1945.
Maybe you’ve heard about VAN-uh-var BUSH conceiving the World Wide Web in 1945 with something called the Memex. That makes him the "grandfather of the web." It’s the origin story that tech elites love to polish because it makes their modern monopolies look like an inevitable, pre-destined evolution.
But here’s the truth: the Memex wasn't a computer, and it certainly wasn't the internet. It was a glorified microfiche cabinet. The story that the Memex "predicted the web" is just another fairy tale that makes for a good story.
If you're looking for a tidy story with one inventor and one eureka moment, you're in the wrong place.
If you want the messy truth, c'mon in and join me on today's journey.
Story:
Maybe you've heard the story.
In 1945, Vannevar Bush imagined a machine called the Memex.
The Memex inspired hypertext.
Hypertext inspired the World Wide Web.
Therefore, Bush invented the web.
Nice story.
Neat story.
Wrong story.
Because the Memex wasn't the web.
It wasn't the internet.
It wasn't even a computer.
But here's where things get interesting...
The idea behind it helped shape the way later generations thought about information.
And once again, we're going to discover that the real history is far messier and far more interesting than the mythology.
Vannevar Bush was looking at the aftermath of World War II and looking at ways to make sure all the scientific data and lessons learned were not lost when he published an Atlantic Monthly article in 1945 titled "As We May Think." Many people point to "As We May Think" as the earliest published vision of the concept of hypertext, the key to what we would later call the World Wide Web.
Bush was pushing for the creation of a "collective memory machine" he called the Memex. So the quick and easy story tellers will say that Vannevar Bush invented the internet in 1945. And the story that it "predicted the web" is a cool a fairy tale to over simply history.
Bush absolutely did not invent the web. He did not invent hypertext. He did not invent networking. He did not invent the internet.
The Memex was an influential vision, not a functioning prototype of the internet.
What made the article "As We May Think" influential wasn't the hardware. It was the conceptual leap.
Bush wasn't the grandfather of the web. He was one of the people who helped change how later innovators thought about information.
To give Vannevar Bush credit for inventing the World Wide Web is another one of the cases where we get hung up on "who invented it" rather than see the total evolution of an idea.
Although I say Vannevar Bush gets too much credit for inventing the World Wide Web, I stress the importance of his visionary ideas that were very influential in creating the partnerships that developed the internet.
There is a lot of debate on the significance of the military and its role in our world. But in the context of modern technology, and especially the internet, a ton of government finding lead by the Department of Defense was dumped into technology projects after WW II.
Another Bush article from 1945 entitled, "Science The Endless Frontier" outlined the importance of federally funded scientific research and called for a national research foundation. The National Science Foundation (NSF) was created in 1950 to support fundamental research and education in science and engineering.
Bush spent much of his life as a scientist looking for ways to strengthen the relationship between government, business, and the scientific community. One could argue that the very relationship between the government, business, and the scientific community that Bush help to create gave us the foundations for the modern internet.
I’ve seen the fads come and go, I've seen the "visionaries" rise and fall, and I know the difference between an actual innovation and a pretty picture someone drew to get funding.
It’s so much easier to tell a story about one "great man" with a vision than it is to talk about the teams of engineers, the government grants, and the thousands of failures it actually took to get us here. They use the Memex to claim that our current tech structure—all-powerful, centralized, algorithmic—is what Bush intended. It’s a retroactive justification for corporate power, and honestly?
It’s lazy.
Because Bush imagined a machine that could organize knowledge.
The next visionary imagined something far more radical.
He imagined computers that people would actually interact with.
Almost as if computers and people could form a partnership.
In the early 1960s, that idea sounded completely insane.
The man who proposed it called it "Man-Computer Symbiosis."
He described a future where computers around the world were connected together, sharing information and resources.
He called it the Intergalactic Computer Network.
No, he wasn't talking about aliens.
But he was imagining something that looked suspiciously like the modern internet.
Next time, we'll meet J. C. R. Licklider, the dreamer who convinced a generation of engineers to stop thinking about computers as machines—and start thinking about them as networks.
And that's where our story really begins.
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As a kid growing up before the age of the internet, I relied on encyclopedias and almanacs to learn about inventors and inventions. As an adult teaching people how to use the internet I hung on many internet forums looking to learn more and dig deeper. At times what I found shocked me. The internet was doing as much to create history, as it was to document history.
I'm tired of all the myths and misinformation spread as the truth, and now thanks to AI it's getting worse. I look at history as an evolution of ideas by many interesting people. I tell stories about the forgotten geeks to increase awareness, educate, and entertain.
Cynics question the status quo; they don't blindly follow the majority views. Cynics poke fun at the absurdities of life to see things differently.
My mission is to challenge oversimplified narratives and spotlight the real, nuanced journey of human innovation.