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g o i n g g l o b a l

ViolaWWW as a Viola application. This took time and was complicated. But finally, people working on Unix machines—and there were lots of them at corporations and universities around the world—could access the Web.

Although browsers were starting to spread, no one working on them tried to include writing and editing functions. There seemed to be a perception that creating a browser had a strong potential for payback, since it would make information from around the world available to anyone who used it. Putting as much effort into the collaborative side of the Web didn't seem to promise that millionfold multiplier. As soon as developers got their client working as a browser and released it to the world, very few bothered to continue to develop it as an editor.

Without a hypertext editor, people would not have the tools to really use the Web as an intimate collaborative medium. Browsers would let them find and share information, but they could not work together intuitively. Part of the reason, I guessed, was that collaboration required much more of a social change in how people worked. And part of it was that editors were more difficult to write.

For these reasons, the Web, which I designed to be a medium for all sorts of information, from the very local to the very global, grew decidedly in the direction of the very global, and as a publication medium but less of a collaboration medium.

There were some pockets of strong internal use. CERN, eventually, was one. Within Digital Equipment there were a hundred Web servers early on that were not available from the outside. These internal servers were not well publicized, so journalists could not see them. Years later the media would suddenly "discover" the "rise" of these internal Web networks and invent the term intranet, with the notion that they were used largely for internal corporate communications. It seemed somewhat ironic to me, since this had been happening all along, and was a principle driving the need for the Web in the first place.