The web was successful because it was simple
The early development of the world wide web was based on providing a basic public good for sharing knowledge. That was key to its success.
I was 10 years old, when Tim Berners-Lee first published the world wide web and made his invention available to the world. A few years later, I was introduced to it by a school librarian who was incredibly excited about it.
But I remember being a bit disappointed in the web because I had just read William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the novel that introduced the concept of cyberspace. In his glittering virtual reality, cyberspace was a landscape that you could fly through and viscerally experience data structures. And on the world wide web in the school library, I had to turn off images in the web browser in order for websites to load fast enough before my lunch break was over.
It was a very different web back then. The world wide web was not William Gibson’s cyberspace, but being curious about the kinds of ideas that influenced the construction of the web, I had the privilege to talk to Jean-Francois Groff. He was one of the pioneers developing the very early world wide web, working together with Tim Berners-Lee at CERN.
What was the future you imagined back then?
“In fact, we had something very similar to what the web is. It was called the Minitel. It was a device that every household in France was given by the post office. They said they wanted to be environmentally friendly. Well actually, they wanted to save money. But they said, ‘we’ll be environmentally friendly and get rid of all this paper for the phone book.’ So, instead of phone books, every household got a little terminal. And you could plug it in your phone line and access a data network. It was very fast. I’m talking 1981. It felt like an opening of the global village.”
Building the world wide web wasn’t part of either your or Tim’s job description?
“No, actually I wanted to work on satellites because that was the state of the art in telecommunications back in the day. But as soon as I got my first email address I was hooked. From that day my career would be online.”
What got you excited about the web?
“It was simple. It was something actually workable. There were plenty of companies doing hypertext projects. Hypertext was not new. It was around since the sixties but it tended to be overly complicated. People wanted to do something perfect. One good example of that was Ted Nelson who wrote a system called Xanadu in the late sixties and he wrote books about it and invented a lot of words like transclusion, so it was really fascinating. But he wanted to build a system that would do everything from day one and that’s why it failed. It was never completed and never pushed on the market even though he had the backing of a lot of companies behind him. But at CERN we needed to help people document what they were doing because it’s a physics lab where people come from all over the world. Sometimes they stay for a couple of years and then go and then there’s information lost. So we just needed a way for the information to be kept. It was not just technology for the pleasure of technology. I love technology, we all do, but if it doesn’t help people then it’s meaningless. And Tim had absolutely the same vision which is why this became a public good.”
So, the original idea of the web, you talked about hypertext, that’s an idea that goes even further back to Vannevar Bush.
“Or H.G. Wells if you like.”
Yeah. It’s an idea that had been in the collective consciousness for a while. And the internet was already existing, so you had all of the components but Tim was the one who put them together in this one structure. What were the most important features that made it this global success?
“Imagine a world where you have some kind of internet but you don’t have the web. So all these computers are connected together but they are different. Some are made by IBM, Some by DEC, some by Apple, some by Osborne, and they all speak their own little languages that we’re built by the engineers at these companies. So the key idea of the world wide web was to make these computers talk to each other over the IP-protocol, which was around and very easy to access, and then invent a language that every computer could use to talk to each other. That was the key idea.”
After you left CERN you started a consulting firm, and your first consulting gig was actually in Denmark. Can you tell us about that?
“It’s always a question of human relations because at CERN there was a big library and it had a program running on a big computer that handled the library catalog like millions of articles and books and reviews that people could search through. So when we had the web, we said ‘hey, it would be nice to connect the big repository of knowledge that you have here to the web.’ But that costs money to do and the head of the library didn’t have a budget. So he called his wife and his wife was the head of the library here at Danmarks Tekniske Bibliotek. And they had a budget so they sent me over to Denmark to connect the catalog of the Library to the world wide web. And that was the first library that was accessible from the web in 1992.”
I guess you also technically had the first web consulting firm?
“That’s correct. Well, I’m not sure but it has not been proven incorrect.”
