About

Why “memex”

“Consider a future device … in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.” Vannevar Bush, 1945

The memex was a machine Vannevar Bush described in The Atlantic in July 1945, in an essay called “As We May Think”. It was never built. He imagined a desk where everything you had read and written was kept, linked by trails you made yourself, and could be found again at speed.

Eighty years later the storage is trivial and the finding is solved. What Bush could not have anticipated is that we would end up with machines that read and write alongside us, and that the hard question would become which of them gets to hold the record.

What memex is

Bush imagined a desk. This memex is a notebook: a simple one, shared by you and all your chatbots and AI agents. Write something down once, and every assistant you connect can find it.

Memex keeps your notes as plain Markdown, makes them searchable by meaning, and hands them to whichever assistant you are working with. It has no AI of its own. The thinking is done by you and by the assistants you already use and already pay for. Memex makes sure you are all working from the same page, and that the page belongs to you.

It is deliberately small. There are professional AI memory systems, and they are good at what they do. Memex is for the everyday work most people do with AI, and does that part simply.

Everything in it is a file you can open, correct, roll back, export or delete. Your assistants can read from it and write to it, on terms you set for each of them.

Memex is free. memex.tools has generous limits, which may change; your own API keys in Settings lift the daily ones. A self-hosted memex on your own computer is free and has none.

Who built it

Memex was built by someone who spent more than two decades looking after data, knowledge and digital governance for people and institutions. Not as a hobby project that went looking for a problem, but out of watching, for a long time, how people actually process information, and how knowledge systems get conceived and then built.

Most of what is here comes from that. The insistence on plain files, the review step in front of anything an agent writes, the refusal to host an AI inside a tool whose job is to hold the record: none of those are technical preferences. They are what you conclude after twenty years of seeing whose hands the knowledge ends up in.

It also comes from a plain observation. Money you put in a bank, you expect to take out whenever you like, without fees or forms. Notes should work the same way, and often don’t: plenty of services make it easy to bring your work in and hard to take it back out. In memex, taking everything out is one click: every note as a plain file, links included, ready for any program or for memex on your own computer.

It was built for its author first, and then opened to people who wanted the same thing.

Where it is now

Free, and open to everyone. Everything described on the site works today.