📸 Photo

weaving the web

for Enquire that talked about circles and arrows, and how useful it was to use their equivalent in a computer program.

In Enquire, I could type in a page of information about a person, a device, or a program. Each page was a "node" in the program, a little like an index card. The only way to create a new node was to make a link from an old node. The links from and to a node would show up as a numbered list at the bottom of each page, much like the list of references at the end of an academic paper. The only way of finding information was browsing from the start page.

I liked Enquire and made good use of it because it stored information without using structures like matrices or trees. The human mind uses these organizing structures all the time, but can also break out of them and make intuitive leaps across the boundaries—those coveted random associations. Once I discovered such connections, Enquire could at least store them. As I expanded Enquire, I kept a vigilant focus on maintaining the connections I was making. The program was such that I could enter a new piece of knowledge only if I linked it to an existing one. For every link, I had to describe what the relationship was. For example, if a page about Joe was linked to a page about a program, I had to state whether Joe made the program, used it, or whatever. Once told that Joe used a program, Enquire would also know, when displaying information about the program, that it was used by Joe. The links worked both ways.

Enquire ran on the group's software development computer. It did not run across a network, and certainly not the Internet, which would not be used at CERN for years to come. Enquire had two types of links: an "internal" link from one page (node) to another in a file, and an "external" link that could jump between files. The distinction was critical. An internal link would appear on both nodes. An external link went in only one direction. This was important because, if many people who were making such a link to one page could impose a return link, that