The view from the continent The story of the internet is by no means only an American one, a new book reminds us

CERN - www.cern.ch

W3C - www.w3.org

The world wide web is so heavily identified with the United States that it's refreshing to read an account of its birth from a European point of view - specifically from the Swiss vantage point of CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. In fact, How the Web was Born belies its title by weaving together three stories describing how the internet, the world wide web and W3C - the World Wide Web Consortium - all came into being, along with a parenthetic account of the genesis of personal computers.

Each is lucidly told by the authors, physicist and CERN science writer James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, one of the web's midwives. Their task is not easy, for as they point out: ''One of the most important characteristics of the internet has nothing to do with its working mechanisms but rather with the way it developed. From the very beginning, ideas were conceived by individual scientists working together in a 'society' that was not contained within a single company or even a single country, but was dispersed around the world.''

The book is therefore not a linear narrative, but jumps between times, locations, and projects in a manner which can be confusing, but, in fact, is as close an approximation to the web's hyperlinking as can be achieved between covers. In some cases it gives more background than appears necessary. As a non-technical example, it's moderately interesting to know that Tim Berners-Lee is an Anglican turned Unitarian, but the explanation of Unitarianism and its history is pretty tangential. On the upside, this approach means that questions raised in the reader's mind are likely to be answered. And in fact, the philosophical position of the principals in this story is relevant: ''The story of the internet's pioneers had been one of incredible

creativity, international collaboration, and, above all, a shared

vision and conviction that they were building something that would change the world.''

Categorised by OUP as ''popular science'', the book nevertheless springs on its second page the sentence: ''A circuit-switched system makes the scalability problem more tractable.'' However, the authors make a good job of explaining complex processes in terms of everyday activities such as sending a postcard, chatting around the dinner table, or organising a wedding plan.

The actual account of the web's birth is prefaced by a potted history of CERN, created in 1949, whose mission ''is and always has been research for the sake of curiosity''. CERN needs a vast site to accommodate its particle accelerator, and the speed with which computing has developed is illustrated by the fact that, as recently as 1975, its main data network was ironically referred to as ''bicycle online technology''. Physicists would take tapes from their data acquisition computers and rush them over to the computer

centre on their bikes, where they would load them on one of the big number-crunchers for analysis. The central computers processed jobs at different priorities, and the ''bicycle online'' priority came top of

the stack.

Londoner Tim Berners-Lee first joined CERN in 1980 on a six-month contract to write programmes, having demonstrated his credentials as a boffin during a vacation from Oxford by using his earnings from a job at a sawmill to buy a second-hand television which he turned into a VDU and a discarded adding machine into a keyboard. By 1989, the bicycles had gone and ''all the ingredients to build the web were in place at CERN'', including Unix computers networked by the TCP/IP protocol using a domain name system. In March of that year, Berners-Lee submitted a memo entitled Information Management: A Proposal. On the cover was a bewildering array of bubbles with arrows pointing between them, and inside was the first draft of a blueprint for the world wide web.

His superior, Mike Sendall, recalled: ''When I read Tim's proposal I could not figure out what it was, but I thought it was great.'' Endorsing the document, he scribbled on the cover: ''Vague but exciting''. The suggestion was for connecting every computer at CERN. ''The actual observed working structure of the organisation is a multiple-connected 'web' whose interconnections evolve with time,'' he observed. And there was a bigger picture: ''The problems of information loss may be particularly acute at CERN, but in this case CERN is a model in miniature for the rest of the world in a few years time.''

The rest of the book hangs on this event - the innovations building up to it and the developments which followed. Cailliau's own extensive role in the web project is understated, but he emerges fully in the final section. This is a long account of how the World Wide Web Consortium came to be established, with Berners-Lee pushing American input from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cailliau championing European involvement.

The exhaustive explanation is less than gripping, but important, for W3C is an essential part of the answer to a frequent question. ''People still ask, 'Who governs the internet?' 'Where is the headquarters?' 'Who is responsible?' And the answer is simply, 'rough consensus and running code.''' W3C, headed by Berners-Lee in Boston, engineers both consensus and code, providing standards and stimulating innovation. This involves a degree of preaching in the wilderness - Netscape has still to implement style sheets even though Hakon Lie was working on them at CERN as long ago as 1994. Indeed, there are several references in the book to the failure of the commercialised web to adopt or match the quality of curious researchers' achievements. But that's scalability for you.

The Eurocentricity of How The Web Was Born is welcome. Fair play is given to developments like Britain's Janet (Joint Academic Network). We learn that the Queen sent an e-mail to Arpanet users in March 1976 announcing its availability at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment at Malvern, and that acceptance of the internet in France was hindered by the successful introduction, 20 years ago or so, of Minitel, the equivalent of Britain's ill-fated Prestel, which gave viewers access to data via television. Minitel succeeded while Prestel failed for two reasons: the French gave consumers free dedicated terminals and it allowed ''erotic'' content. Minitel continues to grow at 3% a year and emulators are bundled with every computer modem sold in France.

But the Americans are scrupulously given their place, beginning with President Eisenhower's anger at the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik I in late 1957, three months ahead of America's Explorer I. Ike imposed scientists on the military under the direction of Defence Secretary Neil McElroy, who'd risen from salesman to president at Proctor & Gamble, to form the Advanced Research Projects Agency, whose computer network, Arpanet, was to be so seminal.

There are fascinating asides, some centring on Doug Englebart, inventor of the concept of windows, the first working hypertext system, and the mouse. The latter, which we take so much for granted, might have been something different: ''The group tried other kinds of pointing devices, ones that could be operated by your head or your knee, but they all gave rise to muscle cramps.'' Meantime, at IBM, people were pointing at hyperlinks with a light pen, then clicking a foot pedal to activate them.

Apart from being a good read, How The Web Was Born offers the reader some advantage in understanding concepts and facilities still transparent on computers and the web, as well as many riches hidden just below their surface.

n How The Web Was Born, by James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, Oxford University Press, #8.99, is published on September 29.