| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : NOVEMBER 1, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| BOOKS
How the Net Was Born--and Where It's Headed WEAVING THE WEB The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor By Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti HarperSanFrancisco 226pp $26 Given all the instant millionaires spawned by dot.com startups, it's odd that the person most responsible for the Internet's transformation of business and society has spurned every get-rich-quick opportunity that has come his way. But Tim Berners-Lee, the reclusive inventor of the World Wide Web, has done so out of a belief that his baby has barely attained adolescence--and that there's a lot more nurturing to do. Berners-Lee, now 44, is very much the staunch idealist. The son of two British academics who both worked on the world's first commercial electronic computer (Ferranti Ltd.'s Mark 1, introduced in 1951), he belongs to a long line of visionaries who have sought to foster social change by unleashing new technology. Before there were computers, people dreamed of knowledge machines that would make the world more egalitarian--as journalist Walter Lippmann did in 1922. Before the Internet, pundits imagined computers cross-indexing human knowledge and following links from one source to another--as engineer Vannevar Bush proposed in 1945. And before the Web, 1960s software pioneers such as Theodor H. Nelson and Douglas C. Engelbart developed hypertext, groupware, windowing, and other tools to facilitate online collaborations. Those concepts were ahead of their time. But they set the stage for Berners-Lee, who turned up in the right place at the right time--at the CERN particle-physics laboratory on the Franco-Swiss border in 1980. As he says in his new book, Weaving the Web: ''I happened to come along...after hypertext and the Internet had come of age. The task left to me was to marry them together.'' Weaving the Web is Berners-Lee's historically important account of how the Web got stitched together at CERN in the 1980s and early 1990s, initially to serve as an internal phone directory, along with his description of ongoing Web developments. The author reflects on such issues as privacy and censorship and, finally, gives his vision of the Web's future. The book is well-written, in part thanks to co-author Mark Fischetti, but the narrative is hardly gripping. Moreover, the cast of characters, including several figures long overdue for recognition, is essentially soulless--names without personalities--perhaps because the publicity-shy author was reluctant to infringe on their privacy. Still, Weaving the Web offers some engaging tidbits. Among these is the pivotal role played by NeXT Inc.'s computers, the advanced workstations developed by Steven P. Jobs after he was ousted from Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL) in a 1985 boardroom coup. In the final three months of 1990, Berners-Lee wrote the world's first Web browser, called WorldWideWeb, on his new NeXT computer and created the first Web site (info.cern.ch). During 1991, the Web was the exclusive province of NeXT machines, because the hypertext portion relied on exploiting a 32-bit ''hole'' in the NeXTStep operating system. After Berners-Lee released his initial software as open-source code on the Internet in August, 1991, other NeXT users began chipping in ideas. More important, the Internet--up to that point, a little-used text-based world--spread the word of Berners-Lee's work, and envious users of other computers began writing their own browsers. In May, 1992, Pei Wei, a student at the University of California at Berkeley, released ViolaWWW, a Unix browser that set the early standard for graphics. That summer, CERN's Robert Cailliau and Nicola Pellow hatched a browser for Macintosh computers. And in February, 1993, a student group at the University of Illinois led by Marc L. Andreessen introduced Mosaic for IBM-compatible PCs. Also interesting is Berners-Lee's take on the controversy surrounding Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) integration of the Windows operating system and its Internet Explorer browser, a development that the Justice Dept. challenged as an antitrust violation. At one point, the author seems to support Microsoft's position, saying it's senseless to have two different interfaces, one for local information--the Desktop screen--and another for all the information on the Web. But later, he worries that prospects for crass corruption of the Web ''become more troubling if a user gets a single browser/operating system that is written as one integrated software program.'' The real reason to read this book, though, is to get Berners-Lee's view of what is still to come. He now heads the World Wide Web Consortium which, based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is coordinating future refinements. Today's Web will, he believes, evolve into what he calls the Semantic Web--a network that will understand the context of human language and become able to make logical inferences and then to reason on its own. It will be able to carry out, independently, most of the routine research and analyses that now sap human creativity, freeing people to do more original thinking. ''It's important that the Web help people be intuitive as well as analytical,'' he writes. ''If we succeed, creativity will arise across larger and more diverse groups.'' In the end, he hopes, the Web will nudge the world toward a time when ''intercreativity and group intuition,'' not war and social conflict, will be the key agents of change and progress. 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