As I turn again to the Valkyrie "Memex" of knowledge and trivia collected around the Honda 6 Cylinder motorcycle, I think about Vannevar Bush's 1945 article, "As We May Think" in which he foretold of a desk that would be able to guide us in our research to all knowledge that we needed.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/12/as-we-may-think/3881/If you've not read it, then you should take a moment a peruse it. Keep in mind that he is writing in response to the great war, and the destruction that that war caused. Bush is keenly interested in how to preserve knowledge so that it could not be destroyed or lost, but instead accessed by anyone. He proposes his Memex as the response to the war as a way to functionally preserve.
Interestingly, his Memex is not that different from the WWW world that has been created and brought routinely to all of our desk tops.
