David Andrade has a wonderful post on Vannevar Bush:
Hopefully Final Crisis will be as filled with revelations and jaw dropping moments as this piece was. Off the top of my head I related what Vannevar was predicting over 50 years ago to at least five different modern devices of media. For starters, we have the jump drive. While he was describing something most people would attribute as a floppy, that little device has gone the way of the Dodo in recent years. All things circling about his “Memex” concept, the man foresaw modern interactions with computers when the only computer around was a giant room of devices that mimicked what we now call a calculator and even THAT device, I believe, was at least five years down the road.