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This is "hypertext," and it was hardly new. The idea was outlined by Vannevar Bush in 1945 and envisioned as an appendage to the brain. Berners-Lee explains the brainlike structure of hypertext by reference to his cup of coffee. "If instead of coffee I'd brought in lilac," he says, sitting in a conference room in M.I.T.'s computer-science lab, "you'd have a strong association between the laboratory for computer science and lilac. You could walk by a lilac bush and be brought back to the laboratory." My brain would do this transporting via interlinked neurons, and hypertext does it via interlinked documents. A single click from lilacs to lab.
The trouble with most hypertext systems, as of the late 1980s, was that they were in one sense unlike the brain. They had a centralized database that kept track of all the links so that if a document was deleted, all links to it from other documents could be erased; that way there are no "dangling links"--no arrows pointing to nothing, no mouse-clicks leading nowhere. When Berners-Lee attended hypertext exhibits and asked designers whether they could make their systems worldwide, they often said no, citing this need for a clearinghouse. Finally, "I realized that this dangling-link thing may be a problem, but you have to accept it." You have to let somebody in Tokyo remove a document without informing everyone in the world whose documents may point to it. So those frustrating WEBSITE NOT FOUND messages delivered by today's browsers are the price we pay for having a Web in the first place.
In between the birth of Enquire and the birth of the Web a decade later, the world had changed. The Internet, though still unknown to the public, was now firmly rooted. It was essentially a bare-bones infrastructure, a trellis of empty pipes. There were ways to retrieve data, but no really easy ways, and certainly nothing with the intuitive, neural structure of hypertext.
To Berners-Lee, now back at CERN, one attraction of the Internet was that it encompassed not just CERN but CERN's far-flung collaborators at labs around the world. "In 1989, I thought, look, it would be so much easier if everybody asking me questions all the time could just read my database, and it would be so much nicer if I could find out what these guys are doing by just jumping into a similar database of information for them." In other words: give everyone the power to Enquire.
Berners-Lee wrote a proposal to link CERN's resources by hypertext. He noted that in principle, these resources could be text, graphics, video, anything--a "hypermedia" system--and that eventually the system could go global. "This initial document didn't go down well," says Berners-Lee. But he persisted and won the indulgence of his boss, who okayed the purchase of a NeXT computer. Sitting on Berners-Lee's desk, it would become the first Web content "server," the first node in this global brain. In collaboration with colleagues, Berners-Lee developed the three technical keystones of the Web: the language for encoding documents (HTML, hypertext markup language); the system for linking documents (HTTP, hypertext transfer protocol); and the www.whatever system for addressing documents (URL, universal resource locator).