In 1989 there were around 600,000 folks on the Internet and most of them were government researchers, scientists, and assorted geeks. They exchanged research data and personal emails. The personal emails were likely to contain obscure mathematical jokes and references to science fiction characters.
It's a bit different today. Today the Internet is hundreds of millions of people in all shapes, sizes, colors and countries. Today the net is your grandmother and your kids and your accountant. And, probably it's you, since more than half of us are connected to the net. We use it to stay in touch and to shop and to find information.
Essentially, we got from the geek-based Internet to your grandmother and a couple of million other folks by taking several steps. And, at each of those steps, we can see how people, problems, preparation and resources interact.
Let's start with a person. His name is Tim Berners-Lee. He's the son of computer scientists, the sort of kid who built toy computers out of cardboard boxes. In 1984 he was working at CERN, a research lab in Geneva Switzerland.
There were lots of researchers at CERN who worked with each other on different projects. They needed to keep up with what each other was doing.
Berners-Lee's first crack at solving the problem was something he called "Enquire Within Upon Everything," a name he lifted from a Victorian encyclopedia. Enquire was a program that used something called hypertext links to tie bits of text together.
Hypertext had been around for a while, since the sixties, in fact. So the basic tool wasn't new. What was new was the application to the problem of helping folks keep up with each other's work. For a while, the solution was good enough. But by 1989 the net was becoming more important as a way to share information. Now that coordination problem was still there, but it involved folks both inside and outside CERN.
So it was back to the drawing boards, or, more accurately, to the project proposal process. It took a couple of years to get the right design and approval. Berners-Lee and others developed a system they called the World Wide Web to link and display information over the net. Among the other names they considered were "Mine of Information" and "Information Mesh."
It's very important to understand that this web thing didn't spring from the head of one person, or even get created without dependence on other things. For one thing, the basic concept looked a lot like something drawn up by Ted Nelson (the same fellow who coined the term "hypertext") in 1981. In a publication called "Literary Machines," Nelson outlined Xanadu: "a networked, world-wide system for publication."
The language of web pages, HTML (HyperText Markup Language), was developed based on SGML, which originally invented by Charles Goldfarb in 1979. It also wouldn't have worked without some agreement on how the Internet would work.
And Berners-Lee wasn't the only one to come up with the idea, either. There was an independent proposal for using hypertext to handle documents at CERN that came from Robert Cailliau. The end product was the result of the work of many people. But that "many people" thing was just beginning.
Berners-Lee shared what he was doing in an Internet newsgroup, alt.hypertext. That more or less made the continued development of the Web a world project. That's a good thing too, because it's doubtful that CERN alone could have found the human or financial resources to do what came next.
Other folks began working to improve the system. Mostly they developed browsers with names like Viola and Midas and Lynx. One of those folks was a kid at the University of Illinois named Marc Andreesen.
Andreesen and friends developed a browser called Mosaic in 1993. The big thing about Mosaic was that it would display pictures and text together. Mosaic looked and acted like just about every browser you see today. Later, Andreesen and several other top programmers were hired by a guy named Jim Clark.
Clark was a successful businessman already. He'd founded a firm called Silicon Graphics and made a bunch of money. When commercial restrictions on the Internet were removed, Clark was one of many businesspeople looking hard at the commercial possibilities that the net might offer. He thought the net might actually be used by businesses who might buy what he had to sell.
Things would have to get simpler though, because Mosaic was still a product for geeks. The folks who used it were willing to spend hours downloading a program over slow connections, then spend days installing it and tweaking it so that they could go back to the net and find more documents about computer programs. In that form, Mosaic, and the web simply wouldn't work for you and me and grandma.
Then, in October, 1994, a company called Spry released a product called Internet-in-a-Box. There was no unique technology about this product, but it's the one that took the Internet public.
Internet-in-a-Box used the Mosaic browser. But it added a few features, they just weren't technological features. Instead, they added manuals and a help line phone number. They told people how to connect to the net. They made it as easy as possible. The feature they added was usability.
After that it was helter-skelter, pell-mell and Katie-bar-the-door. Hundreds of companies came and went. Microsoft got into the act and into court. And more of us, millions of us, came to the net-you and me and grandma.
Looking back, it seems so logical and inevitable. Why they web is brain-friendly. It's easy to use and offers us links just like that associations our minds make naturally. Wow. And, the web with its pictures and sound would be the perfect "killer application" that would get us all on the Internet, all of us, you and me and grandma.
At the time, though, it wasn't so obvious. Back in late 1993, several of us were interviewed for a special Technology section of the Wall Street Journal. The idea was to figure out what the "killer application" for the web might be. When I look back at that section, I'm struck with how so many of us missed the Web as that application.
So, if you're shopping on the web this Holiday season, if you use the net to stay in touch with family and friends across the miles, if you gather information there that makes your life better and richer, stop for a moment and give a bit of thanks.
Be thankful for folks like Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreesen and others who did the technical work that made this all happen. Be thankful for the problems that had to solve that generated solutions that make our lives better.
Be thankful for organizations like CERN who provided resources. Be thankful for the folks willing to take risks and commit resources and energy and money.
Be thankful for all the folks behind the scenes developing standards and writing rules and writing ads and taking risks to make the magic possible. Be especially thankful, in this case, for all those who did it for free, as a labor of love, as something important that needed doing.
There are many stories of human triumph that tell us of the strong leader with the strong vision. There are fewer of stories like this one. It's tempting to see this as the story of Tim Berners-Lee "inventing the web." But that's not the heart of the story.
The heart of the story involves lots of folks with problems to solve or opportunities to seize, will to work, to take risks to build on the work of others and to contribute to something that is bigger than they are. In the end, I find that much more compelling and inspiring.
This feature appeared on 4 December 2000
