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child, due Christmas Eve. As fate would have it, she waited a few extra days. We drove to the hospital during a New Year's Eve storm and our daughter was born the next day. As amazing as it would be to see the Web develop, it would never compare to seeing the development of our child.

As the new year unfolded, Robert and I encouraged people in the Computing and Networking division to try the system. They didn't seem to see how it would be useful. This created a great tension among us about how to deploy our limited resources. Should we be evangelizing the Web? Should we develop it further on the NeXT? Should we reprogram it for the Mac or the PC or Unix, because even though the NeXT was an efficient machine, few other people had them? After all, what good was a "worldwide" web if there were only a few users? Should we tailor the Web to the high-energy physics community, so they'd have a tool that was theirs and would support it, since CERN was paying our salaries? Or should we generalize the Web and really address the global community, at the risk of being personally disenfranchised by CERN?

Trading in the NeXT for some ordinary computer would have been like trading in a favorite sports car for some truck. More important, the Web was already written for it. If we switched to developing the Web for the much more widely used PC, acceptance might be quicker, but the point was to get people to try what we already had. If we stopped progress and went back to redoing things for the PC, we might never get it done. I decided to stick with the NeXT.

As for the application, my gut told me I had to pursue my larger vision of creating a global system. My head reminded me, however, that to attract resources I also needed a good, visible reason to be doing this at CERN. I was not employed by CERN to create the Web. At any moment some higher-up could have questioned how I was spending my time, and while it was unusual to