"The story of how the Web was created has been told in various books and magazines. Many accounts I've read have been distorted or just plain wrong. The Web resulted from many influences on my mind, half-formed thoughts, disparate conversations and seemingly discounnected experiemnts. I pieced it together as I pursued my regular work and personal life. I articulated the vision, wrote the first Web programs, and came up with the now pervasive acronyms URL (then UDI), HTP, HTML, and, of course, World Wide Web."
CERN: "That's were I wrote Enquire, my first weblike program. I wrote it in my spare time and for my personal use, and for no lofttier reason than to help me remember the connections among the various people, computers and projects at the lab. Still, the larger vision had taken firm root in my consciousness."
"In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else."
"I had always stayed on the boundar of hardware and software, which was an important and exciting place to be, especially as software more and more took over hardware functions."
"The Web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect -- to help people work together -- and not as a technical toy."
Reading about the early days of the Web, I was overcome with nostalgia for the old days. The Well had a link to the Internet, and I remember visiting CERN to check things out before NCSA had released Mosaic.
Later, when I just had to have a website, I struggled to get Mosaic running. This entailed downloading Winsock from Australia and deciphering arcane instructions. This didn't work the first twenty or thirty times. Eventually I bought Internet-in-a-Box, put up my home page, devoured books on HTML, graphics, and design.
We early adopters were enthusiasts, sad that the rest of the world just didn't get it.