Word: vannevar
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...White House feigned indifference, and reassured the nation about American scientific prowess. Some of the U.S.'s top scientists, like M.I.T.'s Vannevar Bush, took refuge behind closed doors until they could figure out what to say. Worry seeped through the nation, always uncomfortable with second place. The U.S. hurried its thin, finely engineered rocket, with a satellite, to the launching pad two months later. But Vanguard lurched, buckled and blew up on the ground. The gentle astronomer John Hagen, who headed Project Vanguard, sucked on his ever present pipe and rightly pointed out that U.S. space science was more...
There was a sleepless night in 1957 when the Soviets put up Sputnik and drunken Russians roared and sang in front of their Washington embassy. Science adviser Vannevar Bush sought refuge behind his closed door until he could figure out what to say about our laggard program...
...M.I.T.'s Vannevar Bush builds Differential Analyzer, a mechanical computer...
...Vannevar Bush is an unlikely cyberculture hero. After all, he was F.D.R.'s World War II science czar, organized the Manhattan Project and helped create the postwar military-industrial-university complex. But the onetime professor at M.I.T.--where he built a massive, gear-driven analog computer called the differential analyzer--was also a prophet. In 1945, dismayed by the wartime info overload, he proposed a desktop machine, the "memex," that would display text and pictures (from a microfilm library) at the press of a button. Presciently, Bush envisioned users of his proto-PC following trails of knowledge along storable hypertext...
This is "hypertext," and it was hardly new. The idea was outlined by Vannevar Bush in 1945 and envisioned as an appendage to the brain. Berners-Lee explains the brainlike structure of hypertext by reference to his cup of coffee. "If instead of coffee I'd brought in lilac," he says, sitting in a conference room in M.I.T.'s computer-science lab, "you'd have a strong association between the laboratory for computer science and lilac. You could walk by a lilac bush and be brought back to the laboratory." My brain would do this transporting via interlinked neurons...