One of the forefathers of the information retrieval metaphors we work
with every day was Vannevar Bush. In 1945 he published a
prophetic article in The Atlantic Monthly, outlining the operation of a
workstation called MEMEX. His
As We May Think has
become a classic,
worth rereading whenever one is feeling smug about current technology.
"SGML provides a way to structure information for
easy access -
and frees that information from the constraints of particular
formats, applications, and computing platforms - so that the
information can be used by any system."