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w e a v i n g t h e w e b

stop people at CERN from following their own ideas, my informal project could have been ended. However, it was too soon to try to sell the Web as the ultimate documentation system that would allow all of CERN's documents, within and between projects, to be linked and accessible, especially given the history of so many failed documentation systems. Small but quantifiable steps seemed in order. Our first target, humble beginning that it was, would be the CERN telephone book.

The phone book existed as a database on CERN's aging mainframe. Bernd Pollermann, who maintained it and all sorts of other central information, was charged with somehow providing all this material to each and every user on his or her favorite system. I managed to persuade Bernd that the Web was just what he needed to make life a great deal simpler. If he created a server, I told him, we would get the browsers onto everyone's desktop. He went for it.

I got my simple server to run on the mainframe, then chopped it in two, so that the essential HTTP-related Internet functions were done by my code (written in C language) and Bernd was left to write the rest of the server in his favorite language, "REXX." To make all the documents available, he just had to learn to write HTML, which took him only a few afternoons. Soon the entire world of his search engines, databases, and catalogues was available as hypertext.

That brought us back to the search for a browser. We started porting Nicola's line-mode client onto all sorts of machines, from mainframes through Unix workstations to plain DOS for the PC. These were not great showcases for what the Web should look like, but we established that no matter what machine someone was on, he would have access to the Web. This was a big step, but it was achieved at some sacrifice in that we decided not to take the time to develop the line-mode browser as an editor. Simply being able to read documents was good enough to bootstrap the process. It justified Bernd's time in getting his servers up. But