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weaving the web

things. He is the kind of engineer who can be driven mad by the incompatibility of power plugs. No wonder, then, that he would be attracted to a solution to computer incompatibility, especially coming with a simple user interface. In the marriage of hypertext and the Internet, Robert was best man.

Robert's real gift was enthusiasm, translated into a genius for spreading the gospel. While I sat down to begin to write the Web's code, Robert, whose office was a several-minute walk away, put his energy into making the WWW project happen at CERN. He rewrote a new proposal in terms he felt would have more effect. A CERN veteran since 1973, he lobbied among his wide network of friends throughout the organization. He looked for student helpers, money, machines, and office space.

By the time Mike Sendall approved my purchase of the NeXT machine, I had already gone to the hypertext industry looking for products onto which we could piggyback the Web. At CERN there was a "Buy, don't build" credo about acquiring new technology. There were several commercial hypertext editors, and I thought we could just add some Internet code so the hypertext documents could be sent over the Internet. I thought the companies engaged in the then fringe field of hypertext products would immediately grasp the possibilities of the Web. Unfortunately, their reaction was quite the opposite. "Nope," they said. "Too complicated."

Undaunted, in September 1990 Robert and I went to the European Conference on Hypertext Technology (ECHT) at Versailles to pitch the idea. The conference exhibition was small, but there were a number of products on display, such as a multimedia training manual for repairing a car.

I approached Ian Ritchie and the folks from Owl Ltd., which had a product called Guide. In Peter Brown's original Guide work at the University of Southampton, when a user clicked on a hypertext link, the new document would be inserted right there in place. The version now commercialized by Owl looked astonishingly like what I had envisioned for a Web browser—the program