Page:10 Rules for Radicals.djvu/7

 Thank you for your kind invitation to speak before you today on this occasion of the 19th International World Wide Web Conference. I would particularly like to thank Paul Jones, a man whose sites have hosted poets and presidents and who has given a home on the Internet to the people of Linux and the people of Tibet. Tim O'Reilly says you should put more into the ecosystem than you take out, and there is no better example of this than Paul Jones and his decades of public service to the Internet.

Before I turn to the subject of my talk, I feel I can give you a little context about how to judge these words by telling you about the first time I saw the World Wide Web in action. I was visiting Geneva in 1991 because I was interested in CERN's role as a hub for the growing net, using X.25 to gateway to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

While I was visiting CERN, the head of networking, Brian Carpenter, said I should go see one of the researchers who was doing some interesting work. I went into a dark room and a young man sat behind his spiffy brand-new NeXT workstation and he showed me his research project, a derivative of SGML with a little bit of local area networking thrown in.

I politely watched Tim Berners-Lee give me a demo of his so-called World Wide Web, but I was skeptical. It looked nice, of course, but then anything looked nice on the NeXT workstation, a high-priced hunk of hardware created by a bunch of Apple refugees. Tim showed me how with a click you could pull up a file on another computer, but I wasn't sure this was something that would ever catch