____ encoding schemes, which made any attempt to transfer information be-
____ tween computers generally impossible. The computers simply could not
____ communicate with each other.[3-49]

Berners-Lee thus began to think about a system to enable linking among
documents -- through a process called "hypertext" -- and to build this link-
ing on top of the protocols of the Internet. His ideal was a space where any
document in principle could be linked to any other and where any docu-
ment published was available to anyone.

The components of this vision were nothing new. Hypertext -- links from
one document to another -- had been born with Vannevar Bush,[3-50] and
made famous by Bill Atkinson's HyperCard on the Apple Macintosh. The
world where documents could all link to each other was the vision of Robert
Fano in an early article in the _Proceedings_of_the_IEEE_.[3-51] But Berners-Lee
put these ideas together using the underlying protocol of the Internet.
Hyperlinked documents would thus be available to anyone with access to
the Internet, and any document published according to the protocols of the
World Wide Web would be available to all.

The idea strikes us today as genius. Its success makes us believe the idea
must have been obvious. But what is amazing about the story of the birth of
the World Wide Web is how hard it was for Tim Berners-Lee to convince
anyone of the merit in the plan. When Berners-Lee tried to sell the plan at
CERN, management was unimpressed. As Berners-Lee writes:

____ What we hoped for was that someone would say, "Wow! This is going to be
____ the cornerstone of high-energy physics communications! It will bind the
____ entire community together in the next ten years. Here are four program-
____ mers to work on the project and here's your liaison with Management In-
____ formation Systems. Anything else you need, you just tell us." But it didn't
____ happen.[3-52]

When he went to a meeting of hypertext fans, he could get few to under-
stand the "ah-ha" of hypertext on the Net. For years he wandered from ex-
pert to expert, finding none who understood the potential here. And it was
only after he started building the Web out, and started informing ordinary
people on a hypertext mailing list about the protocols he was developing,
that the Net started to grow.

_The_experts_didn't_get_it_. Someone should put that on a bumper sticker
and spread it around. Those controlling the resources of the CERN com-

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