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that would open and display documents, and preferably let people edit them, too. All that was missing was the Internet. They've already done the difficult bit! I thought, so I tried to persuade them to add an Internet connection. They were friendly enough, but they, too, were unconvinced.

I got the same response from others at the conference. It seemed that explaining the vision of the Web to people was exceedingly difficult without a Web browser in hand. People had to be able to grasp the Web in full, which meant imagining a whole world populated with Web sites and browsers. They had to sense the abstract information space that the Web could bring into being. It was a lot to ask.

The hypertext community may also have been slightly demoralized. Their small conference was not getting any bigger, and no one was sure where the field was headed. The lack of commercial successes had perhaps left a certain cynicism about bright new ideas that could change the world.

Another possibility I saw was called Dynatext, and was from Electronic Book Technology, a company in Rhode Island started by Andy Van Dam, the Brown University researcher who had coined the term electronic book. I thought the company's software could be turned into a Web browser/editor rather easily. However, like many hypertext products at the time, it was built around the idea that a book had to be compiled (like a computer program) to convert it from the form in which it was written to a form in which it could be displayed efficiently. Accustomed to this cumbersome multistep process, the EBT people could not take me seriously when I suggested that the original coded language could be sent across the Web and displayed instantly on the screen.

They also insisted on a central link database to ensure that there were no broken links. Their vision was limited to sending text that was fixed and consistent—in this case, whole books. I was looking at a living world of hypertext, in which all the pages would be constantly changing. It was a huge philosophical gap.