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events for years to come. In April 1994, Gates had decided that the next version of Microsoft's operating system, Windows 95, should include software for accessing the Internet. The decision came only a few weeks after Clark and Andreessen formed Mosaic Communications. Gates wrote a memo to Microsoft employees saying the Internet would constitute a new and important part of the company's strategy. If Gates had made the decision two months earlier, would he have hired the same NCSA people that Mosaic had just grabbed?

The Web was becoming a business. Rather than develop its own Web code, Microsoft licensed browser code from a small NCSA spin-off called Spyglass. The cost was $2 million—more money than any of us involved from the early days would ever have dreamed of.

In November the major marketing campaigns began. At Comdex, the twice-yearly computer trade show, Microsoft announced with great fanfare that its online service, the Microsoft Network (or MSN), would be launched and that software to access and use it would be part of Windows 95. At the same conference, Jim Clark announced publicly that Mosaic Communications was changing its name to Netscape. NCSA had been annoyed about Clark and Andreessen using its software name, Mosaic, as a product name, too, and when the two had hired away NCSA's people, NCSA took offense. An out-of-court settlement was reached, costing the upstart company close to $3 million in expenses and other fees, and requiring it to find a new name. Netscape was it.

Al and I were having our own debates over a name for the nascent organization, arriving at the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C for short. Some of the icons still have a trace of a "W3O" (Organization), which held for a while.

While I worked up a technical agenda, Al energetically signed up members. The Digital Equipment people who had surprised me with their visit at CERN were among the first on Al's