to information retrieval than bush's famous paper as we may think and memex. michael buckland has collected some pointers to materials about emanuel goldberg, who in the 30s worked for zeiss ikon, dresden.

at 1927 emanuel goldberg applied for a patent for his "statistical machine",

that appears to the have been the first functioning document retrieval system to use electronics. Priority is for this technology has been wrongly ascribed to Vannevar Bush.(according to buckland)

also diarmuid pigott comments on that at digibarn.

thx!