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Autodesk had decided Xanadu was an impractical project after all. They were dropping it, leaving the project homeless.

Ted kindly bought me an Indian lunch anyway, and then we went back to his office, which seemed to be an attic in a pyramid building on the Sausalito shore. It was full of copies of his books. I gave him the money I owed and he promptly gave me a second book, autographed. We talked about all manner of things, but not a lot about Autodesk.

After lunch Ted walked me to my car in the parking lot. I took out my 35-mm camera from the trunk to capture the moment. I asked Ted, with some embarrassment, if he would mind posing for my scrapbook. He replied, "Certainly, not at all. I understand completely." He then produced from his knapsack a video camera to shoot some video footage of me. Before he did, though, he held the camera at arm's length, pointed it at his head, and shot a little bit of himself explaining that this was Tim Berners-Lee he would be filming, and what the significance was. Ted explained to me that it was his objective to lead the most interesting life he could, and to record as much as possible of that life for other people. To which end he amassed a huge number of video clips, which were indexed with an image of his own head; that way, he could skip through, and whenever he saw his head he could listen for a description of the next clip to come.

The summer of 1992 had been a thrilling time for me. The Web was being seen and used in many more places, and more people were developing browsers for it. I looked over the logs showing the traffic that the first Web server, info.cern.ch, had been getting over the last twelve months. The curve showing the number of daily hits was a dramatic exponential, doubling every three to four months. After one year, the load had grown by a factor of ten.