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weaving the web

of his or her job time. Dave spent his "10 percent time," plus a lot of evenings and weekends, on Arena. He was convinced that hypertext Web pages could be much more exciting, like magazine pages rather than textbook pages, and that HTML could be used to position not just text on a page, but pictures, tables, and other features. He used Arena to demonstrate all these things, and to experiment with different ways of reading and interpreting both valid and incorrectly written HTML pages.

Meanwhile, the University of Kansas had, independently of the Web, written a hypertext browser, Lynx, that worked with 80 x 24 character terminals. More sophisticated than our line-mode browser, Lynx was a "screen mode" browser, allowing scrolling backward and forward through a document. It had, like Gopher, been designed as a campus-wide information system, and the team joked that Lynxes ate Gophers. Lou Montulli, a student, adapted it to the Web and released a Web browser, Lynx 2.0, in March 1993.

Developing browsers had become a good vehicle for students and engineers to show off their programming skills. David Thompson, a manager at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wanted students to take a crack at it. He downloaded Viola, got it running, and demonstrated its use with the CERN server to the rest of NCSA's Software Design Group.

Marc Andreessen, a student, and Eric Bina, a staff member, decided to create a browser for X. Eric was somewhat like Pei Wei, quietly programming the HTML code and making the thing work. Marc maintained a near-constant presence on the newsgroups discussing the Web, listening for features people were asking for, what would make browsers easier to use. He would program these into the nascent browser and keep publishing new releases so others could try it. He listened intently to critiques, almost as if he were attending to "customer relations." Nourished, it was said, by large quantities of espresso, he would fix bugs and add little features late at night in reaction to user feedback.

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