Berners-Lee, Tim with Mark Fischetti. Weaving the Web. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999. 209 pp.

This is the story of how the web was created at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland in the early 90s. It’s a pretty good story, made even more interesting by how close it seemed to never happening. Berners-Lee always seemed to be under pressure to spend more time on his real work instead of fiddling with this hypertext business. Also remarkable is Berners-Lee’s commitement to making the web as open and free as possible. If Berners-Lee hadn’t developed the web, what eventually would have come would have been very different, certainly more commercial than even today. A near miss, and an interesting idea for an alternate history story.