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CHAPTER 7

C h a n g e s

My experience at NCSA, and the near disaster over licensing, made me more convinced than ever that some kind of body was needed to oversee the Web's development. The Web's fast growth added to my feeling. The Web was starting to change phase. Some people were still sending me e-mail about putting up new servers. But others were not; they just started them. CERN and I were beginning to blend into the background hum. Web activity was increasing at a relentlessly steady, exponential rate. It being mid-summer, I once again graphed the number of people who were accessing the CERN server, info.cern.ch. It was now taking ten thousand hits a day. The rate was incredible, still doubling every three or four months, growing by a factor of ten every year, from one hundred hits a day in the summer of 1991, to one thousand in the summer of 1992, to ten thousand in the summer of 1993.

I no longer had to push the bobsled. It was time to jump in and steer.