📸 Photo

going global

mode browser. Ari, a wild dark Finn took on the server. Each made his mark and put more time and energy into the products than I could have, in some cases turning them upside down to rewrite them into something better. This effort supported a dramatically growing number of Web sites, and "productized" our work so users would find it easy to install and use.

As the browsers appeared, so did new servers, with ever-increasing frequency. Occasionally, one new server would demonstrate to the community what could be done in a whole new way, and pour fresh energy into the young field. One that impressed me was a server of information about Rome during the Renaissance. The Vatican had lent a (physical) exhibit to America's Library of Congress. Some of the material in it had been photographed, scanned into a computer, and made available in the form of image files on an FTP Internet server. Then in Europe, Frans van Hoesl, who was aware of the Web, created a hypertext world of this material on a Web site. The site took the form of a virtual museum; a browser chose a wing to visit, then a corridor, then a room.

On my first visit, I wandered to a music room. There were a number of thumbnail pictures, and under one was an explanation of the events that caused the composer Carpentras to present a decorated manuscript of his Lamentations of Jeremiah to Pope Clement VII. I clicked, and was glad I had a twenty-one-inch color screen: Suddenly it was filled with a beautifully illuminated score, which I could gaze at probably more easily and in more detail than I could have done had I gone to the original exhibit at the Library of Congress. This use of the Web to bring distant people to great resources, and the navigational idiom used to make the virtual museum, both caught on and inspired many excellent Web sites. It was also a great example of how a combination of effort from around the world could lead to fantastic things.

Another classic of its time was a server by Steve Putz at Xerox PARC. He had a database of geographical information that