Computer Lib / Dream Machines was an interesting book, the University of North Dakota library had a copy while I was in college (late-80's).
Now one may wonder how Vannevar Bush was able to have such great insight into how to make computing useful for people when computers were in their infancy. (For instance Von Neumann's description of the Von Neumann computer architecture came out only weeks before.) The explanation is simple - Vannevar Bush had pretty good ideas about how to make this stuff work because he'd been building/configuring/etc computers for almost 20 years at that point. And in his work he'd encountered all sorts of machines that handled information, including machines used for tabulating the census, and he'd been thinking about the memex for about a decade.
We live in a field that likes to forget its history. There is a lot more of it - extending back farther - than we realize.
This reminds me of a quote from Tim Berners-Lee:
“Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the Internet, multifont text objects, had all been designed already. I just had to put them together.”
> BT says a patent filed in the US in 1976 and granted in 1989 gives it ownership of hyperlink technology
Luckily they lost that case.
Probably so, but I suspect the hinderances to innovation and productivity would have been massive.