The concept of hypertext and a memory extension really came to life in July of 1945, when Vannaver Bush's As We May Think was published in The Atlantic Monthly. He urged scientists to work together to help build a body of knowledge for all mankind.
He not only was a firm believer in storing data, but he also believed that if the data source was to be useful to the human mind we should have it represent how the mind works to the best of our abilities. He proposed the idea of a virtually limitless, fast, reliable, extensible, associative memory storage and retrieval system. He named this device a memex.
http://www.search-marketing.info/search-engine-history/
