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All of these elements, from Enquire Within to the brain’s ability to make random associations and to collaborate with others, were jangling around in Berners-Lee’s head when he graduated from Oxford. Later he would realize a truth about i
For Berners-Lee, his own i
“I liked Enquire,” he wrote, “because it stored information without using structures like matrices or trees.”13 Such structures are hierarchical and rigid, whereas the human mind makes more random leaps. As he worked on Enquire, he developed a grander vision for what it could become. “Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked. There would be a single global information space. A web of information would form.”14 What he imagined, although he didn’t know it at the time, was Va
But before he got very far in creating Enquire, his consultancy at CERN came to an end. He left behind his computer and his eight-inch floppy disk containing all of the code, and it was promptly lost and forgotten. For a few years he worked in England for a company that made software for publishing documents. But he got bored and applied for a fellowship at CERN. In September 1984 he arrived back there to work with the group that was responsible for gathering the results of all of the experiments being done at the institute.
CERN was a cauldron of diverse peoples and computer systems using dozens of languages, both verbal and digital. All had to share information. “In this co
Such a system, he felt, would co
So Berners-Lee reconstructed his Enquire program and began thinking about ways to expand it. “I wanted to access different kinds of information, such as a researcher’s technical papers, the manual for different software modules, minutes of meetings, hastily scribbled notes, and so on.”18 Actually, he wanted to do much more than that. He had the placid exterior of a congenital coder, but lurking underneath he harbored the whimsical curiosity of a child who stayed up late reading Enquire Within Upon Everything. Rather than merely devising a data management system, he yearned to create a collaborative playground. “I wanted to build a creative space,” he later said, “something like a sandpit where everyone could play together.”19
He hit upon a simple maneuver that would allow him to make the co
Hypertext was a way to allow the co
Using a NeXT computer, the handsome hybrid of a workstation and personal computer that Jobs created after being ousted from Apple, Berners-Lee adapted a protocol that he had been working on, called a Remote Procedure Call, that allowed a program ru
In March 1989 Berners-Lee had his design in place and officially submitted a funding proposal to the top managers at CERN. “The hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could grow and evolve,” he wrote. “A ‘web’ of notes with links between them is far more useful than a fixed hierarchical system.”22 Unfortunately, his proposal elicited as much bafflement as enthusiasm. “Vague, but exciting,” his boss, Mike Sendall, wrote atop the memo. “When I read Tim’s proposal,” he later admitted, “I could not figure out what it was, but I thought it was great.”23 Once again, a brilliant inventor found himself in need of a collaborator to turn a concept into a reality.