Tim Berners-Lee's manager wrote three words on his proposal and put it to one side, and the World Wide Web was built anyway, as a purchasing decision. The chapter follows the three simple things he wrote, the one-way link that let the web grow and let it break, and the people beside him: Nicola Pellow, the student whose plain browser carried it to the world, and Robert Cailliau, the Belgian engineer who sat through the meetings that gave it away. Then Eric Bina writes Mosaic, and the money arrives.
This chapter has not been serialised yet. It will appear on Substack first, and this page will carry its opening when it does.
- In this chapter
- Tim Berners-Lee, Mike Sendall, Robert Cailliau, Nicola Pellow, Ted Nelson, Marc Andreessen, Eric Bina, Jim Clark
- The idea it builds
- What happens when you click a link: an address, a one-line request, a page, and a pointer that runs one way only, which is why links can break.