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p r o t o c o l s

This was a pile of work, but it opened up new possibilities and also allowed a certain cleaning up as I went along. Jean-François arrived at just the right time. For weeks we sat back-to-back in my office spewing out code, negotiating the interfaces between each other's modules in remarks over our shoulders.

"Can you give me a method to find the last element?"
"Okay. Call it 'lastElement'?"
"Fine. Parameters?"
"List, element type. You got it."
"Thanks!"

We rolled out the Web-specific code and also had to duplicate some of the tools from the NeXTstep tool kit. The result, since a collection of bits of code for general use is called a library, we called "libwww."

Unfortunately, CERN's policy with cooperators like Jean-François was that they had to leave when their time was up. They saw a danger in the staff abusing the program as a recruitment stream, and forbade the employment of any of these people in any way in the future. When Jean-François came to the end of his term, we tried everything we could to allow him to continue to work on the Web, but it was quite impossible. He left and started a company in Geneva, infodesign.ch, probably the very first Web design consultancy.

Meanwhile, I had begun to keep logs of the number of times pages on the first Web server, info.cern.ch at CERN, were accessed. In July and August 1991 there were from ten to one hundred "hits" (pages viewed) a day.

This was slow progress, but encouraging. I've compared the effort to launch the Web with that required to launch a bobsled: Everyone has to push hard for a seemingly long time, but sooner or later the sled is off on its own momentum and everyone jumps in.

In October we installed "gateways" to two popular Internet services. A gateway was a little program, like that opening up Bernd's mainframe server, that made another world available as