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weaving the web

part of the Web. One gateway went to the online help system for Digital's VAX/VMS operating system. Another was to Brewster Khale's WAIS for databases. This was all done to add incentive for any particular individual to install a browser. VMS targeted the physics community, and WAIS the Internet community. I also started an online mailing list, [email protected], for technical discussions as a forum for the growing community.

Always trying to balance the effort we put into getting involvement from different groups, Robert and I decided we now had to promote the Web hard within the hypertext community. A big conference, Hypertext '91, was coming up in December in San Antonio. Most of the important people in the field would be there, including Doug Engelbart, who had created the mouse and a collaborative hypertext system way back in the 1960s. Though it was difficult to find the time, we cobbled together a paper for it, but didn't do a very good job. It was rejected—in part because it wasn't finished, and didn't make enough references to work in the field. At least one of the reviewers, too, felt that the proposed system violated the architectural principles that hypertext systems had worked on up till then.

We were able to convince the conference planners to let us set up a demonstration, however. Robert and I flew to San Antonio with my NeXT computer and a modem. We couldn't get direct Internet access in the hotel. In fact, the hypertext community was so separated from the Internet community that we couldn't get any kind of connectivity at all. How could we demonstrate the Web if we couldn't dial up info.cern.ch? Robert found a way. He persuaded the hotel manager to string a phone line into the hall alongside the main meeting room. That would allow us to hook up the modem. Now we needed Internet access. During our cab ride from the airport, Robert had asked the driver what the nearest university was and found out that it was the University of Texas in San Antonio. So Robert called the school and found some people who understood about the Internet and maybe the