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fer Protocol (HTTP), the language computers would use to communicate over the Internet, and the Universal Resource Identifier (URI), the scheme for document addresses.

By mid-November I had a client program—a point-and-click browser/editor—which I just called WorldWideWeb. By December it was working with the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) I had written, which describes how to format pages containing hypertext links. The browser would decode URIs, and let me read, write, or edit Web pages in HTML. It could browse the Web using HTTP, though it could save documents only into the local computer system, not over the Internet.

I also wrote the first Web server—the software that holds Web pages on a portion of a computer and allows others to access them. Like the first client, the server actually ran on my desktop NeXT machine. Though the server was formally known as nxoc01.cern.ch (NeXT, Online Controls, 1), I registered an alias for it—"info.cern.ch"—with the CERN computer system folks. That way, the server would not be tied by its address to my NeXT machine; if I ever moved its contents to another machine, all the hypertext links pointing to it could find it. I started the first global hypertext Web page, on the info.cern.ch server, with my own notes, specifications of HTTP, URI, and HTML, and all the project-related information.

At this point Robert bought his own NeXT machine and we reveled in being able to put our ideas into practice: communication through shared hypertext.

At long last I could demonstrate what the Web would look like. But it worked on only one platform, and an uncommon one at that—the NeXT. The HTTP server was also fairly crude. There was a long way to go, and we needed help. Ben Segal, who had a knack for adjusting staffing levels behind the scenes, spotted a young intern named Nicola Pellow. A math student from England, Nicola was working for a colleague in a neighboring building but didn't have enough to do.

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