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protocols

The only thing missing was that it didn't run on the Internet. Same story.

I tried to persuade the people at Grif to add the software needed for sending and receiving files over the Internet, so their editor could become a Web browser, too. I told them I would give them the software outright; they would just have to hook it in. But they said the only way they would do that was if we could get the European Commission to fund the development. They didn't want to risk taking the time. I was extremely frustrated. There was a growing group of people who were excited about the possibilities of the World Wide Web, and here we had the technology for a true hypertext browser/editor mostly developed, and we couldn't bridge the gap. Getting Commission funding would have put eighteen months into the loop immediately. This mindset, I thought, was disappointingly different from the more American entrepreneurial attitude of developing something in the garage for fun and worrying about funding it when it worked!

In March 1991, I released the WorldWideWeb program to a limited number of CERN people who had NeXT computers. This would at least allow them to write their own hypertext and make the Web information that Robert and I were putting on info.cern.ch available to them.

Word spread within the high-energy physics community, furthered by the cross-pollinating influence of travel. In May 1991 Paul Kunz arrived for a visit from the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) in Palo Alto. Like me, he was an early NeXT enthusiast, and he had come to CERN to work on some common NeXT programs. Since he had the right computer, he was in a position to use the Web directly, and he loved it.

When Paul returned to SLAC he shared the Web with Louise Addis, the librarian who oversaw all the material produced by SLAC. She saw it as a godsend for their rather sophisticated but mainframe-bound library system, and a way to make SLAC's substantial internal catalogue of online documents available to

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