The rise of the personal computer by Apple and IBM introduced the rest of the world to computing. At first, computers were the tools of technically inclined nerds, but new applications drew other people to the keyboard. With an affordable modem, people could connect with other computer enthusiasts and commercial online services. People were using the computer as Bush and Licklider had prophesized, as a medium to interact with other people.

A venerable institution of international collaboration was the setting for the major development in the history of the Internet. It began when Tim Berners-Lee, a computer programmer at CERN in Switzerland, got to play on a new NeXT workstation. The object-oriented operating system was an inspiration for a problem he was working on – how to distribute information across a diverse network of different computers and operating systems. He started working on a protocol very similar the “docuverse” described by Ted Nelson, but reduced it down to a minimal, working model.