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weaving the web

native England, organized by International Computers Ltd. The spring weather was wet and dark. We were bused through the rainy evening from the seminar to dinner. On the way back I sat next to David Gifford, who happened to be a professor at MIT's LCS. I told him I was thinking of setting up some kind of body to oversee the evolution of the Web. I wondered what kind of structure might work, and where to base it. He said I should talk to Michael Dertouzos about it. He explained that Michael was the director of LCS, and said he thought Michael might be interested in doing something. I expressed happy surprise, noted "mld@hq.lcs.mit.edu," and promptly e-mailed him when I got back to CERN.

I was further motivated by another Internet phenomenon that had recently taken place. The gopher information system at the University of Minnesota had started at about the same time as the Web. It was originally created as an online help system for the university's computing department and spread to become a campuswide information system that also allowed people to share documents over the Internet. Instead of using hypertext and links, it presented users with menus, taking them eventually to documents normally in plain text. I had found that some people, when they saw the Web, thought hypertext was confusing, or worried that somehow they would get lost in hyperspace when following a link. Of course, this could happen in gopherspace too, but computer users were familiar with menus, so the program didn't seem as foreign.

It was just about this time, spring 1993, that the University of Minnesota decided it would ask for a license fee from certain classes of users who wanted to use gopher. Since the gopher software was being picked up so widely, the university was going to charge an annual fee. The browser, and the act of browsing, would be free, and the server software would remain free to nonprofit and educational institutions. But any other users, notably companies, would have to pay to use gopher server software.