Ok, ok, so I may have made up the whiskey part, but it’s still an interesting chapter in the history of e-books!
Vannevar Bush, whose name sounds like a character I forgot to kill off in one of my pulp stories, sat there in 1945 staring at books, libraries, filing cabinets, and academic journals and basically ruled the whole paper empire a busted carnival of dead trees and crap design.
It was no good if ya just wanted to sit down on your couch, quickly find and read whatever, and hang out while nursing a drink and smoking a cigar.
His answer was the Memex, a hypothetical electromechanical ebook reader with a name mashed together from “memory” and “index.” The concept was first unleashed in his 1945 essay “As We May Think.”
The idea was simple. Swallow your whole intellectual life in one bite. Every book ya owned, stuffed inside. Notes, letters, photographs, drunk 3 a.m. scribbles (my personal fav!), all shoved into its metal gut. You'd sit down, hit a few keys, and pages would snap onto translucent screens. Pure ebook reader behavior, long before plastic slabs and progress bars.
The Memex didn't care about the neat ritual of reading a paper book from page one to page three hundred. It wanted a lil nerdy chaos thrown in. Ya hit one page, launch to another, graffiti the margin, peel off into some half related rabbit hole, vanish for a week, then drop back in right where your brain scorched the wallpaper. To be honest, that's also how I write my own crappy ebooks, so Bush and I might share a diagnosis.
The whole contraption ran on microfilm, that jittery strip of analog futurism that smelled exactly like the back corner of my high school library where I once considered trying to kiss Lisa Hummel. She was dating some football dude, my confidence existed only in theory, and the only thing I touched was a dusty book I pretended to study when she caught me staring.
Under the desk, the Memex had mechanical guts chattering away, and Bush knew the whole thing was clunky and earthbound. Portability was just offstage, waiting for the tech to stop being heavy and embarrassed and shrink from desk monster to briefcase stowaway to backpack companion to something that disappears into your hand like a smug little Kindle.
The Memex deserves its spot as an early ebook reader concept because it was an early idea to digitize books.
Wikipedia article about it with pics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex
Essay where the concept was introduced:
https://web.mit.edu/STS.035/www/PDFs/think.pdf