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Berners-Lee's selflessness contributed, no doubt, to the Web's weed-like dissemination and growth. "As technologists and entrepreneurs were launching or merging companies to exploit the Web, they seemed fixated on one question: 'How can I make the Web mine?'" writes Michael Dertouzos in the book's foreword. (Dertouzos was present at the birth of the Internet, and he is now the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lab for Computer Science, where Berners-Lee helps run the World Wide Web Consortium.) "Meanwhile, Tim was asking, 'How can I make the Web yours?'"

But that same selflessness makes much of Berners-Lee's book read as though it had been written by a third party, and not by the inventor himself. (Maybe that co-writer played a bigger part than he's credited with.) We get exactly one paragraph about Berners-Lee's boyhood in London: His parents, both mathematicians, developed the Mark I, the world's first commercial, stored-program computer, at Manchester University. Racing to get past the section on his youth, he mentions that one evening, he came home from high school to find his father "reading books on the brain, looking for clues about how to make a computer intuitive, able to complete connections as the brain did." That gets the teenage Berners-Lee thinking about how "computers could become much more powerful if they could be programmed to link otherwise unconnected information" -- a line of thinking that eventually led to the Web.

There's nothing more, though, about an upbringing that, according to published profiles of Berners-Lee, included math games at the breakfast table and make-believe computers made of cardboard boxes; and there's just one sentence in which the ever-humble author admits to building his first real computer from an old television and a primitive M6800 microprocessor while studying physics at Oxford University. I wasn't expecting a breathy, code-and-tell book from Berners-Lee, but it would've been interesting to learn more about his education and the environment he was raised in. Photos (published elsewhere) from his college days, for example, are intriguing, showing the shaggy-haired Berners-Lee wielding a soldering iron; clearly, the urge to tinker is central to his personality.

After two post-college jobs, Berners-Lee jumped to a "brief software consulting job" at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. (He wound up staying for nearly 14 years.) There, his ideas about linking unconnected information began to mature. The first evidence of that was a program called Enquire, written to help Berners-Lee "remember the connections among the various people, computers, and projects at the lab."

Before long, Berners-Lee began thinking how much more powerful Enquire would be if it contained links to information stored on any computer anywhere. At CERN, researchers used a motley assortment of computer equipment, and Berners-Lee's original proposal for what became the Web envisioned a system that would let the researchers share documents across any of the machines, whether they were PCs, Macs, Unix boxes or even a NeXT workstation, Berners-Lee's platform of choice. Because CERN was such a heterogeneous computing environment, the Web from the start would be friendly to all kinds of different systems.

The proposal was shelved twice; CERN, it seems, was more interested in particle physics than information technology. Berners-Lee was persistent, though, and he eventually got a half-hearted go-ahead. Still, writing the first Web browser and server software was an easier task than convincing anyone at CERN to start using it. It wasn't until Berners-Lee ported the center's phone book to the Web and held a series of seminars introducing researchers and the support staff to the new set of protocols that a handful of people began adopting them. Once he introduced the Web to the alt.hypertext newsgroup, though, it really began to take off.

"I began to get e-mail from people who tried to install the software," Berners-Lee writes. "They would give me bug reports, and 'wouldn't it be nice if ...' reports. And there would be the occasional 'Hey, I've just set up a server, and it's dead cool. Here's the address." With reminiscences like that, you get a sense that it must've been pretty exciting for Berners-Lee to watch his invention catch fire.

Once others got involved in writing browsers and servers and other software for the Web, Berners-Lee began to feel his control slip; the medium was no longer his own personal project. The inventor's early interactions with Mosaic developer (and eventual Netscape co-founder) Marc Andreessen were particularly tense. "[Andreessen] was always talking about Mosaic, often with hardly a mention of the World Wide Web," writes Berners-Lee. "The people at NCSA [the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign] were attempting to portray themselves as the center of Web development, and to basically rename the Web as Mosaic. At NCSA, something wasn't 'on the Web,' it was 'on Mosaic.'" Berners-Lee's alarm comes through loud and clear; it's one of the few points in the book where the reader gets the sense that Berners-Lee felt some possessiveness, some personal attachment to the Web.

Ultimately, that pride of authorship paled in comparison to Berners-Lee's desire to make the Web ubiquitous. He successfully crusaded to convince CERN's directors to put the Web protocol into the public domain, without royalties or any strings attached. Then, he left CERN to form the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT and supervise the evolution of those protocols, while trying to ensure that no single company commandeered the Web for its own purposes.

Next page | If he invented the Web, why isn't Berners-Lee a kajillionaire?