Rapid Selector

The Rapid Selector was designed as a follow-up project to the Navy Comparator from 1938 onwards by a development team led by Vannevar Bush . It was intended as a machine for managing large amounts of data and scientific work.

In Bush's draft, the documents were reduced in size, stored on microfilm and encoded in a machine-readable manner. The machine presented in 1940 was not the elegant, inexpensive Memex that Bush had described years earlier, but it was patented in 1942 and used by the secret service and American librarianship during the 1940s and 1950s .