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Berners-Lee also wrote the first server software. And, contrary to the mythology surrounding Netscape, it was he, not Andreessen, who wrote the first "graphical user interface" Web browser. (Nor was Andreessen's browser the first to feature pictures; but it was the first to put pictures and text in the same window, a key innovation.)
The idea of a global hypertext system had been championed since the 1960s by a visionary named Ted Nelson, who had pursued it as the "Xanadu" project. But Nelson wanted Xanadu to make a profit, and this vastly complicated the system, which never got off the ground. Berners-Lee, in contrast, persuaded CERN to let go of intellectual property to get the Web airborne. A no-frills browser was put in the public domain--downloadable to all comers, who could use it, love it, send it to friends and even improve on it.
But what should he name his creation? Infomesh? No, that sounded like Infomess. The Information Mine? No, the acronym--TIM--would seem "egocentric." How about World Wide Web, or "www" for short? Hmm. He discussed it with his wife and colleagues and was informed that it was "really stupid," since "www" takes longer to say than "the World Wide Web."
There was no single moment when the magnitude of Berners-Lee's creation hit home with thunderous force. But there have been moments of sudden reckoning. Two years ago, Berners-Lee still had pictures of his two young children on his Website. Then someone pointed out that there were enough data there for "strange people" to locate them, and that there were strange people on the Web. "You have to think like that more as the thing scales up," he acknowledges.
The Web's growing lack of intimacy, in a way, symbolizes his one big disappointment with it. It was meant to be a social place. "The original goal was working together with others," he says. "The Web was supposed to be a creative tool, an expressive tool." He had imagined, say, a worker posting a memo on a Website accessible only to colleagues and having them react by embedding hyperlinks that led to their comments or to other relevant documents; or a bicoastal family similarly planning its annual reunion on the family site.
But the Web turned out otherwise. Robert Cailliau of CERN, Berners-Lee's earliest collaborator on the project, describes the Web's prevailing top-down structure: "There's one point that puts the data out, and you're just a consumer." He finds this model--whose zenith is the coming wave of so-called push technology--an "absolute, utter disaster."