Vannevar Bush wrote about the invention called the "memex" in his 1945 essay "As We May Think." The memex was a hypothetical electromechanical device envisioned as a microfilm viewer that could store and retrieve vast amounts of information through associative links, a concept considered a precursor to modern hypertext and the World Wide Web. It was meant to help researchers access and organize information more efficiently by creating trails of linked information for easy navigation. The memex was not a physical invention but a visionary concept describing how technology might enhance human knowledge management and information retrieval in the future.