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going global

to CERN, both Larry and Karen called independently with offers to come visit them if I did take leave. I could join Karen as a visiting researcher at MIT, and join Larry as a visitor at Xerox PARC.

Both invitations were appealing, because both institutions were highly respected and either could give me a much-needed view of what was happening in the United States rather than Europe, and in information technology rather than physics.

Encouraged by the enthusiasm of people like Larry and Karen, Robert and I released notes about the Web on more Internet newsgroups. But we were frustrated by the fact that the Web's use within CERN itself was very low. We trod a fine line between dedicating our time to supporting users within CERN at the risk of neglecting the outside world, and pursuing the goal of global interactivity at the risk of being bawled out for not sticking to CERN business.

By now the Web consisted of a small number of servers, with info.cern.ch the most interconnected with the rest. It carried a list of servers, which to a degree could coordinate people who were putting information on the Web. When the list became larger, it needed to be organized, so I arranged it in two lists, by geography and by subject matter. As more servers arrived, it was exciting to see how the subjects filled out. Arthur Secret, another student, joined me for a time and set up the lists into what we called the Virtual Library, with a tree structure that allowed people to find things.

Part of the reason the Web was not being used much within CERN—or spreading faster outside CERN, for that matter—was the lack of point-and-click clients (browsers) for anything other than the NeXT. At conferences on networking, hypertext, and software, Robert and I would point out that for the Web to grow, we really needed clients for the PC, Macintosh, and Unix. At CERN, I was under pressure to make a client for the X Window system used by most Unix workstations, but I had no resources. We were so busy trying to keep the Web going that there was no

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