= "The dream behind the web" Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1990. Pierre Ruetschi, a journalist for the Swiss daily Tribune de Genève, asked him in December 1997: "Seven years later, are you satisfied with the way the web has evolved?". He answered that, if he was pleased with the richness and diversity of information, the web still lacked the power planned in its original design. He would like "the web to be more interactive, and people to be able to create information together", and not only to be consumers of information. The web was supposed to become a "medium for collaboration, a world of knowledge that we share." In a short essay posted on his webpage, Tim Berners-Lee wrote in May 1998: "The dream behind the web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was online, we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together." (excerpt from: "The World Wide Web: A very short personal history", available on the W3C website) 1993: THE ONLINE BOOKS PAGE IS A LIST OF FREE EBOOKS = [Overview] Founded in 1993 by John Mark Ockerbloom while he was a student at Carnegie Mellon University (in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), The Online Books Page is "a website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the internet. It also aims to encourage the development of such online books, for the benefit and edification of all." John Mark first maintained this page on the website of the School of Computer Science of Carnegie Mellon University. In 1999, he moved it to its present location at the University of Pennsylvania Library, where he is a digital library planner and researcher. The Online Books Page offered links to 12,000 books in 1999, 20,000 books in 2003 (including 4,000 books published by women), 25,000 books in 2006, and 30,000 books in 2008. The books "have been authored, placed online, and hosted by a wide variety of individuals and groups throughout the world", with 7,000 books from Project Gutenberg. The FAQ also gives copyright information about most countries in the world with links to further reading. = [In Depth]