Bush's article went far and wide, and if I can brag for our magazine a little, is considered one of the most influential magazine articles ever published about technology, and perhaps in any field. It even landed inside LIFE Magazine in a condensed format in September of 1945.

Millions of copies of the September 10 issue were printed and distributed around the world. LIFE had established itself as the preeminent photo chronicler of World War II and the Red Cross habitually kept reading materials like it around for soldiers. And so it was that a copy of that issue, containing most of Bush's article -- including the whole Memex section and conclusion quoted here -- made its way to a Red Cross library on the (even now, still remote) island of Leyte in the Philippines.

Meanwhile, young Doug Engelbart, a radar technician in the Navy who never saw combat (the war ended as his boat pulled out of the San Francisco Bay), was on his way to the Philippines, too. He was transferred to Leyte, the island, and though the record is not precisely clear on this point, perhaps to the little village called Leyte, too, at the end of a long inlet. It was here that, in the words of John Markoff, Engelbart "stumbled across a Red Cross reading library in a native hut set on stilts, complete with thatched roof and plentiful bamboo." Five years ago, a visitor to Leyte snapped this photograph of the the town of Leyte.

In a hut like this -- and maybe even one of these huts specifically -- Engelbart opened up that issue of LIFE and read Bush's Atlantic article. The ideas in the story plowed new intellectual terrain for Engelbart, and the seeds that he planted and nurtured there over the next twenty years grew, with the help of millions of others, into the Internet you see today.

The Los Angeles Times obituary succinctly summed up his impact on the world: "Douglas Engelbart, whose work inspired generations of scientists, demonstrated in the 1960s what could happen when computers talk to one another." Steve Wozniak went further, crediting Engelbart's 1960s research "for everything we have in the way computers work today." Yes, he invented the mouse, but he also laid out the concepts we'd need to understand the networked world.

So, in one tangible and real sense, the Internet we know now began in that hut across the world. As Bush made new thoughts possible for Engelbart, Engelbart made it possible for us to imagine the rest of it.

Engelbart wrote Bush a letter describing how profoundly he'd been affected by the latter's work. "I might add that this article of yours has probably influenced me quite basically. I remember finding it and avidly reading it in a Red Cross library on the edge of the jungle on Leyte, one of the Philippine Islands, in the fall of 1945," he wrote. "I rediscovered your article about three years ago, and was rather startled to realized how much I had aligned my sights along the vector you had described. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the reading of this article sixteen and a half years ago hadn't had a real influence on my thoughts and actions."