After reading Nelson's book, and becoming caught up in what one might call "the dream of hypermedia," I began to read some of the works he cited as inspirations. For Nelson, the most important of these was an article published in 1945, an article which is also central to the history of new media we are now writing: Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think." Within this piece, the memex is introduced -- a "future device for individual use... a sort of mechanized private file and library" in the shape of a desk. The memex, as described, uses methods such as microfilm storage, dry photography, and analog computing to give the post-war scholars access to a huge, indexed repository of knowledge -- any section of which can be called up with a few keystrokes. Documents can be projected on different screens for comparison, and the scholar can create associative connections between them, as well as longer trails through the memex's data store. Individuals can also use the memex to add their longhand notes, photographs, and drawings to the microfilm repository; items such as the daily newspaper can arrive on microfilm and simply be dropped in. It is docuverse envisioned at a time before digital computing and networking, and a suggestion of many of still-present dreams of hypertext/media writing. Bush described trails of connections being shared among scholars, the possibility of a new profession of trail-blazers, and great thinkers' disciples not simply inheriting "additions to the world's record," but also being able to access the connections, the structure, the tools by which that work was created. Reading Bush, I came to understand that linking and filtering, in hypertext/media, are not simply additions to writing. They are themselves writing, deeply entwined with every writing and reading process, from the professional to the personal, from the "once in a lifetime" to the everyday.