Where Good Ideas Come From

by Steven Johnson

The application allowed you to store small blocks of information about people or projects as nodes in a connected network. It was easy to attach two-way pointers between nodes, so if you pulled up a person’s name, you could instantly see all the projects he or she was working on. The application proved to be genuinely informative, but the programmer soon switched jobs and abandoned the code. He started up another version, which he called Tangle, a few years later, but it never got off the ground. But then, almost ten years after he had first programmed Enquire, he began sketching out a more ambitious application that could make connections between documents stored on different computers, using hypertext links. For a while he struggled with the right name for his nascent platform, calling it an information “mine” or “mesh.” Eventually, he hit upon a different metaphor for the platform’s dense network. He called it the World Wide Web.