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founder of the American venture capital sector. This son of a founder of France’s Peugeot car company moved to the United States after World War I and became first a student and then a professor at Harvard Business School, where he taught for more than four decades.
    During World War II, Doriot went to work for the US Army’s quartermaster corps as head of research and development, overseeing the creation of the portable meals known as K-rations and water-repellent boots and clothes, and taking part in the crash program to develop synthetic rubber. Plastic armor capable of resisting bullets was named Doron after him.
    Following the war, Doriot, who had been promoted to general, went back to Harvard Business School. He founded American Research and Development (ARD), a pioneering venture capital company that commercialized new technologies, many of them devised at MIT. One of the companies that ARD invested in was Zapata Off-Shore, founded by the son of Connecticut senator Prescott Bush, the young George Herbert Walker Bush. 31
    At Harvard Business School, General Doriot taught a popular class called Managing. Doriot tried to interest one of his students, Tom Perkins, into succeeding him at ARD. Instead, Perkins teamed up with an Austrian Jewish refugee from the Nazis, Eugene Kleiner, to form Kleiner Perkins in 1972. Kleiner Perkins and other venture capital firms played an integral role in the development of the tech industry in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.
    OF MICE AND HYPERTEXTS
    Returning to Vannevar Bush, we follow another trail on the imaginary memex that connects him with Douglass Engelbart. In 1962, Engelbart, then an engineer at Stanford Research Institution, wrote Bush: “I re-discovered your article about three years ago, and was rather startled to realize how much I had aligned my sights along the vector you had described.” 32
    Engelbart was in the navy, working as an electronics technician, when he read “As We May Think” at the time of its publication in 1945. Influenced by Bush’s description of the memex, he came up with the idea of a display like that of a radar set capable of interaction with users. He labored for years developing his ideas for an NLS (oNLine system) at Stanford University, before unveiling the finished product in San Francisco’s Brooks Hall on December 9, 1968. In what has been described as “the mother of all demos,” Engelbart demonstrated the use of the computer mouse to control symbols on a screen, along with texts and graphics sharing a screen, videoconferencing, and hyperlinks. 33
    Using “hyperlink” as the key phrase, our imaginary memex allows us to follow a “skip trail” to Theodore H. “Ted” Nelson. “Bush was right,” Nelson declared in a 1972 paper entitled “As We Will Think.” 34 Nelson coined the term “hypertext” for the two types of trails that Bush imagined for his memex: side trails and step trails. Tim Berners-Lee incorporated Nelson’s term into “hypertext transfer protocol,” or “http.” Berners-Lee also named the World Wide Web, the source of the Internet address www.
    THE INTERGALACTIC COMPUTER NETWORK
    On the imaginary memex, we return to “As We May Think” and read: “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.” In his 1965 book Libraries of the Future , J. C. R. Licklider described “As We May Think” as the “main external influence on his ideas.” 35
    Licklider, a psychologist and computer scientist, worked for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), created in order to achieve an American lead in technology following the shock of the successful launching of the first satellite, Sputnik, by the Soviet Union in October 1957. ARPA was renamed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1972. Renamed ARPA in 1993, it became DARPA again in 1996 so that it could be shielded