A Bush is not a Bush is not necessarily a Bush

When I was in lieberry skool a few years back, one of the required readings I most enjoyed was Vannevar Bush's 1945 essay "As We May Think", in which he predicted, among other things, a device, the "memex", that sounds much like an analog version of a personal computer. (See especially sections 6-8). He was wrong about the mechanical details of just how the storage and retrieval of information would be handled, since the transistor and many other required components of digital technology were not yet invented, but it's interesting that, by thinking about what people would *want* to do with technology, he was able to predict with a reasonable degree of prescience what they *would* do with it.

Of course, he wasn't always right, but that's the danger of being a prognosticator.