ABSTRACT
The work of Franklin Roosevelt's chief scientific adviser, Vannevar Bush, has had a profound impact upon technology's incursions into society in the latter half of this century. As the founding father of the Advanced Projects Research Agency, he created the grant-awarding body that moulded American science and technology research. The Memex system uses microfilm to store and retrieve texts. Rather than relying upon external systems of cataloguing and indexing for the storage and retrieval of material, the Memex allowed the user to forge links within the text's content. Hypertext offers valuable insights into the relations between the figuring of digital memory and understandings of human memory. An intelligent agent's ability to navigate an information space by blazing associative trails in a manner that replicates human behaviour, will be predicated upon that agent's ability to forget.
