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By October there were more than two hundred known HTTP servers, and certainly a lot more hidden ones. The European Commission, the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, and CERN started the first Web-based project of the European Union, called Webcore, for disseminating technological information throughout the former Soviet bloc countries in Europe. Then in December the media became aware, with articles in major publications about the Web and Mosaic, and everything was being run together.

Meanwhile, the community of developers was growing. It would be obviously exciting to hold a World Wide Web conference to bring them together on a larger scale than the Wizards Workshop had done. I had already talked to Robert about it, and now the need was more pressing. He got the go-ahead from CERN management to organize the first International WWW Conference and hold it at CERN. Robert was excited and checked the schedule of availability for the auditorium and three meeting rooms. There were only two dates open within the next several months. He booked one of them immediately. He came back and said, "You don't have to do anything. I'll do everything. But this is the date it has to be held."

I said, "Well, Robert, that's fine, except that it's the date that my wife and I are expecting our second child." He realized there were things that could be moved and things that couldn't be. He sighed and went back to see if the other date was still available. It was, but the date, at the end of May, was earlier than the first one, and it left us with short notice to get it all together.

Robert went about quickly coordinating all the bits and pieces needed for a conference, including speakers. One of the first people he called was Joseph Hardin at NCSA. But Hardin's response to Robert was: "Oh, well, we were thinking of holding a conference, and May is basically when we were going to do it, in Chicago. Would you mind canceling your conference so we can go ahead with ours?"