I might have killed the webDecember 1995 When I arrived at the hotel at the Second WWW Conference in Chicago, a year before, the first person I met was Yuri Rubinsky. Yuri worked for SoftQuad, a company in Toronto that made HTML editors. We talked for a bit while we stood in line to check into the hotel, and always nodded and said hi to each other as we passed in the halls that week. After the events that transpired after last year's conference, I was pretty geeked about attending the Fourth International World Wide Web Conference in Boston. I checked into the hotel, dumped my stuff in the room, and went down stairs to register. And who was the first person I laid my eyes on as I stepped off the elevator? Yuri Rubinsky. No, there aren't really millions of people using the web...just a few thousand who show up to conferences and create a lot of hype. I excitedly waved across the room at him, and got this confused look in return. He didn't remember me from Adam. No matter...the week was feeling pretty cool already. Of course, the web had exploded in the last year, so the Boston conference was a lot less cozy than the gathering in Chicago. Presentation sessions were held in these big, long rooms with hundreds of people. If you didn't get a seat in front, the presenters were these little tiny specks that were difficult to relate to. For me, the people were what this event was all about. A lot of big companies were there trying to court the web community to see things their way. The CEO of Prodigy uttered a totally ridiculous thing in an attempt to recruit web developers into his fold. It went something like: "I've got the economic model that works! Think of the web like the music industry. You're the artists, and we're the record label..." Good thing for him that three quarters of the crowd had already walked out of the room by that point. Much more inspiring was this cocky guy from Kodak who was leading the team that was bringing PhotoCD to the web. Or this other cool person who was building a conferencing system. Or many of the other of people who had created things that they were working to spread like a religion. That's why I love the web so much. People who do stuff rule. One of the highlights of the week was the closing session of the technical program, where Douglas Englebart, the inventor of many technologies that made the web possible. During the presentation, a video tape was played of the demonstration of the very first on-line hypermedia system in the 1960's. At one point, Englebart was expounding on the capacity of these systems to allow collaborative work. The camera cut to a graduate student who was miles away, but working on the same system. "Now we can collaborate!", Englebart proclaimed. After a short pause, the student looked at the camera and sheepishly asked: "What do you want me to say?" It was the clarion call to a new generation. Even in the beginning, we needed artists to help figure out how to express ourselves with this stuff. It was a moving experience. All of that vision Englebart had in the 60's was coming alive now. And the guy who made this awards event happen? Yuri Rubinsky. That night, I went out for dinner with some good friends from Michigan State. I was feeling kind of tired, so I turned in a little early... My great ambition for the week was to occur the next morning when Mark Pesce gave a talk on developers day. Pesce was one of the originators of Virtual Reality Modeling Language, and the kind of personality only the web could produce. Here was someone who had a dream, sent a few email messages out, and ended up starting a revolution. So determined was he to see his visions through that he created a community of people to develop it, and moderated among them. And only two years after the dream was born, VRML had become a standard that huge amounts of resources being invested in it. And all of this was flowing from someone who, in the world I live in, was a seriously strange character. When I awoke the next morning, I immediately knew there was something wrong. I felt like I had aged 80 years. My muscles ached, my joints didn't work, and I was really low on energy. Wow, I didn't think I had that much to drink the night before...but it must be that I had. I felt like shit, but I had looked forward to this day for weeks, so I wasn't going to miss it. I dragged myself downstairs, and found a seat in the front row. I really wanted to experience this up close. I wasn't feeling any better after getting something to eat and walking around a bit. I was beginning to sweat. I was becoming light-headed. It began to dawn on me that there might be something more going on than a bad hangover. I decided to watch the first session, which featured Pesce's VRML talk, and then go upstairs and try to sleep this thing off. Then I looked to my right, and sitting only 10 feet away was Mr. Pesce himself. Whoa! Lots of people were coming to talk to him. He was having a lot of fun. Cool! Then I looked the other way, and sitting only 10 feet on my left was Mr. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Then I looked forward and standing only 10 feet in front of me was Mr. Arthur VanHoff, the author of the Java compiler. I was sitting in the middle of it. I felt like I should do something to meet at least one of these people, but given my condition I was scared to do this for fear of infecting them with whatever little vermin might be crawling around my system, and that it would be my bewildered mug that would appear on the front of Time magazine six weeks later, with the caption: "I KILLED THE WEB!"scrawled in big, scary type underneath. No sirree. I think I'll just sit here and watch. I made it through VanHoff and Pesce's presentations, and dragged myself upstairs to bed. A couple hours of sleep would get rid of this, I thought. I woke up at about 4:00 that afternoon. I was in sad shape. The next day, my voice began to go away. When my fever broke a couple days later, the bed was like a swimming pool. I was having such a good time in Boston, I still wasn't admiting to myself that I may have actually had the flu until I returned to Ann Arbor. I spent a good part of the next week in bed, and my voice didn't return fully until three weeks later. A sad postscript... About six weeks after the conference, I was saddened to learn of the death of Yuri Rubinsky. It was from this news that I learned that he not only worked for SoftQuad, but that he was the President and co-founder of the company, and had worked hard to promote the standardization of SGML. And it was from learning this that for many months, I became a religious user of HoTMetaL Pro. Walt Whitman wrote this when he was writing vast poems about technology: A noiseless patient spider, And you O my soul where you stand, Yes, there are millions of people using the web. But there are a handful of pioneers that dreamed great dreams of their own and did things with them that give us the opportunity build our own... |