P r o t o c o l s

Simple Rules for Global Systems

Incompatibility between computers had always been a huge pain in everyone's side, at CERN and anywhere else where they were used. CERN had all these big computers from different manufacturers, and various personal computers, too. The real world of high-energy physics was one of incompatible networks, disk formats, data formats, and character-encoding schemes, which made any attempt to transfer information between computers generally impossible. The computers simply could not communicate with each other. The Web's existence would mark the end of an era of frustration.

As if that weren't advantage enough, the Web would also provide a powerful management tool. If people's ideas, interactions, and work patterns could be tracked by using the Web, then computer analysis could help us see patterns in our work, and facilitate our working together through the typical problems that beset any large organization.

One of the beautiful things about physics is its ongoing quest to find simple rules that describe the behavior of very small, simple objects. Once found, these rules can often be scaled up to

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