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tangles, links, and webs

By late 1988 I was plotting to somehow get a hypertext system going. I talked to my boss, Mike Sendall. He said it sounded like a reasonable idea, but that I should write up a proposal. A proposal? I had no idea what went into a "proposal" at CERN. I thought, however, that I'd never get the go-ahead to develop a hypertext documentation system unless it was approved as a formal project. I thought hard about how to get the excitement of this idea into a form that would convince people at CERN.

Although Enquire provided a way to link documents and databases, and hypertext provided a common format in which to display them, there was still the problem of getting different computers with different operating systems to communicate with each other. Ben Segal, one of my mentors in the RPC project, had worked in the States and had seen the Internet. He had since become a lone evangelist for using it at CERN. He went around pointing out how Unix and the Internet were binding universities and labs together all over America, but he met a lot of resistance. The Internet was nearly invisible in Europe because people there were pursuing a separate set of network protocols being designed and promoted by the International Standards Organization (ISO). Whether because of the "not invented here" feeling, or for honest technical reasons, the Europeans were trying to design their own international network by committee.

I was intrigued with the Internet, though. The Internet is a very general communications infrastructure that links computers together. Before the Internet, computers were connected using dedicated cables from one to another. A software program on one computer would communicate over the cable with a software program on another computer, and send information such as a file or a program. This was originally done so that the very expensive early computers in a lab or company could be used from different sites. Clearly, though, one computer could not be linked to more than a few others, because it would need tens or hundreds of cables running from it.