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weaving the web

almost certainly involve some programming in order to set up a real system at CERN on many machines. An important part of this, discussed below, is the integration of a hypertext system with existing data, so as to provide a universal system, and to achieve critical usefulness at an early stage.

By the end of March 1989 I had given the proposal to Mike Sendall; to his boss, David Williams; and to a few others. I gave it to people at a central committee that oversaw the coordination of computers at CERN. But there was no forum from which I could command a response. Nothing happened.

While I waited for some kind of feedback, I tested the idea in conversation, and reactions varied. CERN people moved through a number of overlapping loyalties, perhaps one to CERN, one to an experiment, to an idea, to a way of doing things, to their original institute . . . not to mention the set of Macintosh users or IBM/PC users. Another reason for the lackluster response was that CERN was a physics lab. There were committees to decide on appropriate experiments, because that was the stock-in-trade, but information technology was very much a means to an end, with less structure to address it. The situation was worse for very general ideas such as global hypertext. Even the RPC project, also an exercise in generality, had little formal support from within CERN, but it had enough support among different groups that I could keep it going.

In the meantime, I got more involved with the Internet, and read up on hypertext. That's when I became more convinced than ever that I was on the right track. By early 1990 I still had received no reactions to the proposal. I decided to try to spark some interest by sending it around again. I reformatted it and put a new date on it: May 1990. I gave it to David Williams again, and again it got shelved.

During this time I was talking to Mike Sendall about buying a new kind of personal computer called the NeXT. NeXT Inc. had