Profile: Molding the Web; December 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Holloway; 2 Page(s)

The intense Tim Berners-Lee abruptly rolls his chair away from the central table in his bare corner office over to two huge computer screens and starts typing as fast as he is speaking--for the listener, it is akin to a thick hailstorm hitting. The inventor of the World Wide Web is about to demonstrate how he first envisioned his creation and, by extension, how it has not lived up to his expectations.

With amazing speed, Berners-Lee uses his original software to set up a home page, make links to new pages and toggle between them. He shows how easy it should be to insert connections to other Web sites and how any user should be able to save comments into a document-- just like writing in the margin of your book, but in this case, your note could transport you to the electronic version of the place you are musing about. "It was to be a very interactive medium; that was the idea. But you ain¿t got that," Berners-Lee laments.