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began to get e-mail from people who tried to install the software. They would give me bug reports, and "wouldn't it be nice if ..." reports. And there would be the occasional "Hey, I've just set up a server, and it's dead cool. Here's the address."

With each new message I would enter in info.cern.ch a hypertext link to the new web site, so others visiting the CERN site could link to that address as well. From then on, interested people on the Internet provided the feedback, stimulation, ideas, source-code contributions, and moral support that would have been hard to find locally. The people of the Internet built the Web, in true grassroots fashion.

For several months it was mainly the hypertext community that was picking up the Web, and the NeXT community because they were interested in software that worked on the platform. As time went on, enough online people agreed there should be a newsgroup to share information about the Web, so we started one named comp.infosystems.www. Unlike alt.hypertext, this was a mainstream newsgroup, created after a global vote of approval.

Another small but effective step to increase the Web's exposure was taken when I opened a public telnet server on info.cern.ch. Telnet was an existing protocol, also running over the Internet, that allowed someone using one computer to open up an interactive command-line session on another computer. Anyone who used a telnet program to log into info.cern.ch would be connected directly to the line-mode browser. This approach had the disadvantage that the user would see the Web as a text-only read-only system. But it opened the Web to millions of people who could not install a Web browser on their machine. It meant that someone putting up a Web server could say to "telnet to info.cern.ch then type 'go www.foobar.com,'" which was a whole lot easier than requiring them to install a Web browser. The initial home page seen by users of this public service would include links to instructions for downloading their own browser. Years later we would have to close down the service, since the