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weaving the web

A big incentive for putting a document on the Web was that anyone else in the world could find it. But who would bother to install a client if there wasn't exciting information already on the Web? Getting out of this chicken-and-egg situation was the task before us. We wanted to be able to say that if something was on the Web, then anyone could have access to it—not just anyone with a NeXT!

When I gave talks, I showed a diagram with machines of all types connected to the Internet, from mainframes with simple character-oriented terminals through PCs, Macs, and more. To make this possible, I urged Nicola to give the Web the best browser she could, but to assume as little as possible, so this interface could work on any kind of computer. The least common denominator we could assume among all different types of computers was that they all had some sort of keyboard input device, and they all could produce ASCII (plain text) characters. The browser would have to be so basic that it could even work on a paper Teletype. We therefore called it a line-mode browser, because Teletype machines and the earliest computer terminals operated by displaying text one line at a time.

Meanwhile, I took one quick step that would demonstrate the concept of the Web as a universal, all-encompassing space. I programmed the browser so it could follow links not only to files on HTTP servers, but also to Internet news articles and newsgroups. These were not transmitted in the Web's HTTP protocol, but in an Internet protocol called FTP (file transfer protocol). With this move, Internet newsgroups and articles were suddenly available as hypertext pages. In one fell swoop, a huge amount of the information that was already on the Internet was available on the Web.

The WorldWideWeb browser/editor was working on my machine and Robert's, communicating over the Internet with the info.cern.ch server by Christmas Day 1990.

As significant an event as this was, I wasn't that keyed up about it, only because my wife and I were expecting our first