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weaving the web

physicists worldwide. Louise persuaded a colleague who developed tools for her to write the appropriate program, and under Louise's encouragement SLAC started the first Web server outside of Europe.

Seeing that the high-energy physics people at SLAC were so enthusiastic about the Web, we got more aggressive about promoting it within CERN. In May, Mike Sendall got us an appearance before the C5 committee, which was continually looking at computing and communications, to explain how useful the Web could be, so management would continue to justify the work. Robert and I wrote a paper, too, "Hypertext at CERN," which tried to demonstrate the importance of what we were doing.

What we hoped for was that someone would say, "Wow! This is going to be the cornerstone of high-energy physics communications! It will bind the entire community together in the next ten years. Here are four programmers to work on the project and here's your liaison with Management Information Systems. Anything else you need, you just tell us." But it didn't happen.

In June we held talks and demonstrations within CERN, and wrote about the Web in the CERN newsletter. Because I still had no more staff, it was taking longer than I had hoped to get the functionality of the NeXT version onto PCs and Macs and Unix machines.

I was still hoping that by spreading the word we could attract the attention of more programmers. Since those programmers were unlikely to be high-energy physicists, in August I released three things—the WorldWideWeb for NeXT, the line-mode browser, and the basic server for any machine—outside CERN by making them all available on the Internet. I posted a notice on several Internet newsgroups, chief among them alt.hypertext, which was for hypertext enthusiasts. Unfortunately, there was still not much a user could see unless he had a NeXT.

Putting the Web out on alt.hypertext was a watershed event. It exposed the Web to a very critical academic community.

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