Hoping that a well-crafted FAQ might allay fears, if not actually save humanity, I began constructing one. I borrowed heavily from existing FAQs, like those written by the Mahir “I Kiss You!!!” Cagri Fan Club and the sci.bio.entomology.lepidoptera newsgroup. And now, here is my definitive list of frequently asked questions about the turn of the millennium:

What are the roots of the Y2K problem?

Contrary to media reports, the mainframe programmers of the 1960s were not shortsighted in using just two digits to represent the year (99 instead of 1999, for example); they were actually quite forward-thinking. Anticipating a depressing state of date-lessness on the biggest Friday night of their lives, they devised the millennium bug to provide a plausible reason to spend New Year’s Eve 1999 in front of a monitor, watching for system anomalies and purchasing Seven of Nine collectibles on eBay.

How should I prepare for December 31?

Experts recommend assembling the same amount of food and supplies you’d have on hand for a blizzard, hurricane or other serious storm. Keeping paper records of bank and brokerage accounts from December 1999 through January or February of 2000 is also advisable. Stockpiling a year’s supply of grits is probably overkill.

What should I be most concerned about on New Year’s Day?

Well, if the U.S. government is right, not any Y2K technology troubles. Terrorism is top of the list for New Year’s fears. After the December arrest of an Algerian man who was caught smuggling nitroglycerin across the Canadian border, federal officials have ordered increased security at government buildings and airports. President Clinton has advised Americans to be aware and report suspicious situations, but not to panic. The people should “go about their holidays and enjoy themselves.” So by all means break out the party hats and kazoos — but you may want to use discretion with the pyrotechnics, especially if your travel plans involve crossing checkpoints.

Is my savings account Y2K-compliant or should I take all my money out of the bank?

Well, most U.S. banks have upgraded their systems and tested them for months to be sure they won’t fall victim to the millennium bug. Many even plan to open their doors on January 1 — a Saturday — to show that they are engaging in “business as usual” and to discourage mass withdrawals. Unruly mobs of passbook-waving citizens will be welcomed with free lollipops and circuitous, imperceptibly-moving queues.

“Experts” recommend having a few days’ — maybe even a week’s worth — of cash on hand. But I wonder who will be accepting it. If the power to your ATM fails, what are the chances that the Wendy’s drive-thru will be open? As for getting supplies post-Apocalypse, forget it. Your cash will be worthless at any hardware store filled with bar code scanners and electronic cash registers.

Should I be concerned about accidents at nuclear power plants?

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission reports that safety-related systems in all 103 U.S. nuclear plants are ready for 2000. Even Chernobyl, the notorious nuclear plant in Ukraine, purports to be Y2K-ready. “We have conducted tests and are certain now the main computer will pass the changeover,” Chernobyl’s Y2K expert, Anatoliy Iliichev, told the Associated Press. Asked about the backup computer, Iliichev held up his forearm, pointed to his digital calculator watch and said, “Brand new batteries.”

How much will the federal government spend eradicating Y2K bugs?

The Office of Management and Budget estimates that, by September 2000, the federal government will have spent $8.38 billion on Y2K-related problems. As part of that figure, the Federal Aviation Administration said it had spent $368 million — the price of two 747s — fixing its systems. The Pentagon spent $3.6 billion, enough to buy an aircraft carrier. The White House shelled out $23 million, enough for a tanker’s worth of Michelob, a crate of t-shirts imprinted with the slogan “We’re Gonna Party Like It’s 1999″ and a steamy, hip-swivelin’ command performance by Christina Aguilera. President Clinton said he planned a quiet evening at home with friends.

What’s this I hear about champagne shortages?

In some parts of the world, true French-made champagne will be scarce, usually because of parsimonious party-planners. Revelers will be plied with domestic sparkling wine and, in some situations, ginger ale chilled with floating scoops of store-brand sherbet. Do not panic. The situation can be remedied by uttering cutting comments about your hosts to anyone within earshot.

Is my Furby Y2K-compliant?

Tiger Electronics, Furby’s manufacturer, cautions that some Furbies may turn feral at 12:01 on Jan. 1 and begin gorging on household pets and small children. Tiger stresses that there is no cause for alarm, but the company strongly recommends letting your Furby sleep through the New Year, preferably in a locked metal box buried at least 16 feet underground.

Who is Peter de Jager, and where will he be on New Year’s Eve?

De Jager is a Canadian computer consultant who wrote one of the first articles warning the world about Y2K, back in 1993. Since then, he has been the self-appointed Paul Revere of the millennium bug, alerting corporations, IT professionals and national governments to the dangers of Y2K. In the process, he has developed a taste for seeing his name in the media; he now gravitates toward microphones with the single-mindedness of a congressman up for reelection.

In 1997, when I asked him where he would be on New Year’s Eve this year, he had a pre-fab answer at the ready: “I will be in a place called Doolin, a small fishing village in West Clare, Ireland. They have two bars. There’s good food, good conversation and no computers.” After the New Year arrived, he planned to “take a long nap.”

Since then, de Jager has changed his plans to something a little higher-profile. Now, he’ll be on a plane, flying from Chicago to London to demonstrate his faith in the people who prepared the world’s air traffic control systems for the calendar-flip. And, according to an essay on his Year 2000 Web site, he’ll be cuddling up to the press during the flight: “I’ll actually be doing an interview with a reporter at the fateful moment.”

Who is Jewel, and where will she be on New Year’s Eve?

Jewel is the banshee-throated chanteuse from Alaska, and on New Year’s Eve, one place she won’t be is the Sullivan Sports Arena in Anchorage. The Associated Press reported that her millennial engagement there was cancelled in part because of a fear of the Y2K bug, and in part because only 1,000 of the 8,000 available tickets were sold over the course of a month. (Many grandiose celebrations have been canceled due to global Y2K apathy and a little-known millennial affliction called homebody syndrome.)

Wherever Jewel is when 2000 arrives, she’ll be well conditioned for any worst case scenarios: When she was growing up in Homer, Alaska, her home had no TV or running water, and as an aspiring singer in San Diego, she lived in a van.

What if I choose to spend the New Year’s holiday engaging in my favorite pastime? Hacking, that is.

John Koskinen, chairman of the President’s Council on Year 2000 Conversion, asks that you kindly refrain. “Hopefully [hackers] will recognize we’re going to have enough things going on that weekend, that this will not be a particularly good weekend to demonstrate the need for more information security,” he told a group of reporters earlier this month. Instead, Koskinen suggested that hackers seeking to make a point about the need for increased security should make it the following weekend, when the Y2K frenzy will presumably have waned.

Koskinen also beseeched anyone planning to hack into Hotmail’s servers to please retrieve his password, which he had written down on a scrap of paper that has apparently disappeared from his wallet.

Who will be keeping an eye on the world’s important systems on New Year’s Eve?

Well, Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers, Hewlett-Packard president Carly Fiorina and Microsoft president Steve Ballmer are among the execs who will be manning their desks. They’ll be joined by thousands of programmers ’round the world — the real heroes of this whole global Y2K effort. If not for their selfless toil, et cetera. Raise a toast to them. Then polish off the last cocktail knish.

Will Y2K have any negative effect on the stock market?

The Asian financial crisis, the impeachment of a president, the shambles in the former Soviet Union, the resignation of Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the radio dominance of the Backstreet Boys and repeated dour comments by Alan Greenspan haven’t managed to put the reins on this bull market. I’m guessing two missing digits won’t do it, either.

What if my plans for welcoming in the new millennium involve love in an elevator?

You may be out of luck, Sparky. Many high-rise buildings will take elevators out of service during the transition. In New York, one building management company reports that at about 11:50 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, its elevators will all descend to the ground floors and remain there for 20 or 30 minutes with their doors open. “We’re not trying to be alarmist,” the company’s president told the New York Post, “but we don’t want anyone ringing in the New Year stuck in an elevator.” Stuck?

What about Y2K problems in countries outside the U.S.?

Many nations were late to start identifying and eliminating Y2K bugs. In a statement released in July, the State Department cautioned, “All U.S. citizens planning to be abroad in late 1999 or early 2000 should take the potential for temporary disruptions related to Y2K into account when making their travel plans.”

As an example, half of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa have done little or nothing to get ready for the new millennium, according to the International Y2K Cooperation Center, an agency of the World Bank. The other half, reassuringly, have already gone straight to their local Kia dealer for great deals on the 2000 Sportage and Sephia.

How can I differentiate everyday glitches from serious Y2K problems?

“If we watched the world tomorrow as closely as we will watch Jan. 1, we’d see a whole set of things not working,” Koskinen told the New York Times. To illustrate that, his Council on Year 2000 Conversion collected some data on typical, everyday failure rates of common systems. Between 1 and 2 percent of the nation’s 227,000 automatic tellers are inoperable or out of cash at any given moment, for example. And just about every week, somewhere in the U.S., public connections to a local 911 center fail.

So, here are some clues to help you distinguish Y2K-induced traumas from the ordinary variety: Pieces of airplane fuselage plummeting into your living room may be an indicator of a Y2K problem. Being unable to find the remote during a crucial bowl game is, in most cases, not an indicator of a Y2K problem.

What about Feb. 29, 2000?

Even after the Y2K crisis recedes from memory like a bad pickup attempt at the punchbowl, we may be in for one more inconvenience. Conventional wisdom says that years that end in double-zero are never leap years. But in fact, there are two every millennium, and next year is one of them. As a result, some computer programs may ignore the fact that Feb. 29 exists in 2000. My advice: You should, too.

Sleep through it.

Audience members would line up behind a microphone in the aisle. Some would inevitably be clutching brown envelopes stuffed with copies of their novels, which they intended to thrust into the hands of the visiting author before the night was through. This was the mid-1980s, when having a book on the bestseller list was still a viable way to achieve celebrity in America. These people wanted an agent, a contract, a publisher, and they would ask questions that struck me, even in my early teens, as incredibly inane:

“Do you use a typewriter or a word processor, or do you write longhand?”

“Should you bind a manuscript when you send it to an agent?”

“What weight of paper do you use?”

“Whats the ideal length for a book proposal?”

The visiting author would answer the questions as diplomatically and patiently as he could, though a few would protest that the particulars of paper weight and line spacing werent factors in landing an agent or publisher. Still, the audience members would go home, pleased that they had been let in on a few of the secrets to becoming a Published Writer.

I was transported back to those author Q&A’s this week, when I attended the Bootcamp for Startups in Wellesley, Mass., just west of Boston.

The event, organized by Garage.com, a Palo Alto company that helps connect young, primarily tech-focused companies with investors, was held at Babson College — a school known for its entrepreneurship programs. Babson, located in the wealthy Boston suburbs, feels not like an army base, but a miniature version of Harvard. There are lush expanses of perfectly mowed grass separating federal-style brick buildings, their white cupolas topped with light green, oxidized copper caps.

Attendees converging on Babson for the Bootcamp for Startups were promised “a conference featuring an established network of industry experts, insiders, venture capitalists, and angel investors.” Mostly, it seemed, they were interested in those last two.

On a shuttle bus transporting the would-be Jeff Bezoses from a satellite parking lot to the center of campus, I sat next to an entrepreneur from Philadelphia who, when asked about his hometown, launched into a good-humored but jaded diatribe about the lack of Internet-savvy there. “You have to sit around explaining an affiliate program to people, and how it is they make money,” he said incredulously. “Everyone asks, ‘Why would Amazon pay you to sell books for them?’” The local venture capitalists — while scarce — are slightly better informed, according to my seatmate, though they are reluctant to invest in a Philadelphia start-up until Silicon Valley venture capitalists give it their stamp of approval by offering to lead the first round of funding. “They’ll follow, as long as you find another investor to lead. It’s crazy.”

At registration, held inside the college’s gymnasium, I was handed a name tag bearing the red-and-blue Bootcamp for Startups logo, with the word “Bootcamp” done up in a stenciled, faux-military font. Inside the plastic badge-holder, behind the name tag, was a bright yellow card. At technology trade shows, usually these cards serve as some kind of incentive to get you to stop by a particular company’s booth; instinctively, I throw them away.

This one, however, was not a promotion. It was titled “Schmooze Codes,” and it explained how to label your name tag so that people you encountered at the conference would be able to instantly see what kind of business you were starting and what stage you were at. (I had never seen this before, and I go to a fair number of conferences.) For example, if you were looking for early-stage “seed” funding and had an Internet portal idea, you would write S-IP in the upper right corner of your badge “in bold block letters about 1/2 inch high.” If you were already fully funded and had a semiconductor company (there were not many of these people in attendance), you would write F-HW. One guy’s name tag looked like a rack of Scrabble tiles: S-IC IB IS IT IP SW OT, indicating that his business was in seven different industries (including “other”). I decided that either he was incredibly unfocused, or he had the next Microsoft on his hands.

Inside the Knight Auditorium, the conference was already under way. The space felt like an austere New England meeting house, with a U-shaped balcony, tall windows lining the two long walls and a slightly raised stage at the front. The lighting was jarringly inappropriate — yellow and green beams shone upward against the wall behind the speakers. It gave the stage a “Wizard of Oz” — as in, “the great and powerful Oz has spoken” — kind of vibe.

Onstage, Guy Kawasaki, Garage.com’s chairman and the former “chief evangelist” at Apple Computer, was introducing the first panel, titled “Basic Training.” It started out well. Kawasaki is one of the high-tech world’s more engaging presenters, and on this particular morning he was as impish, chipper and energetic as ever.

Introducing Richard Testa, a senior partner at the Boston law firm of Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault (he was the only member of the panel wearing a tie), Kawasaki recounted having lunch with Testa when he was in the middle of starting Garage.com. “I was in a T-shirt and jeans,” Kawasaki said, “and Dick was wearing a nice shirt with French cuffs and cuff links — he looked very important, very powerful.” Kawasaki pulled a pair of cuff links out of his pocket and held them up. “I just want to show you that I have cuff links now,” he said, to laughter from the audience, “and I’m working on the shirt.”

The subtext of that comment seemed to set a fitting tone for the day. In the old economy, it was the well-dressed lawyers with their flashy cuff links and single-needle-stitched shirts who garnered respect and envy in a town like Boston. In the new economy, it’s the start-ups that have the power — of world-changing new ideas, of capital, of incredible growth. Kawasaki, long a cheerleader for this new economy, wants to be its Kevin Bacon (as in the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”): Entrepreneurs will go through Kawasaki and Garage.com to find deep-pocketed investors, and investors will go through the company to find brilliant entrepreneurs. The cuff link joke seemed to say that Kawasaki and his new company — which recently opened its first branch office in Boston — were the new matchmakers, the new power brokers in town, and the start-ups in Garage.com’s database were the new center of gravity.

Kawasaki has developed a rather high-profile personality in the technology world, writing books (most recently “Rules for Revolutionaries”) and a column for Forbes, and rallying the Macintosh faithful for Apple. Like Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Kawasaki has acquired a cultlike following; several people I spoke to at the conference said they had come specifically to see Kawasaki. “I’m a longtime Mac user, and Guy has been really inspirational to me,” said one. “I felt like I owed it to him.”

Kawasaki, in his speaking and writing, paints with a roller, not a brush. He is the tech world’s Tom Peters. He makes high-level recommendations like “harness naiveti,” meaning that you should ask naive people to do things that conventional wisdom brands impossible, and often they will succeed.

So I was surprised, as he moderated the day’s first two panel discussions, to hear him asking picayune, packaging-obsessed questions that harked back to the author Q&A’s of my youth. The panelists were bankers, lawyers, accountants and venture capitalists. Among Kawasaki’s questions:

“How long do you think a business plan should be?”

“How many business plans do you see a day?”

“How long should the pitch last, and how many slides should there be in the PowerPoint presentation?”

“How many e-mails and voice mails do you get every day?”

The answers perfectly paralleled what a panel of literary agents and publishers and writers would tell a roomful of wannabe novelists. Venture capitalists, the late ’90s equivalents of literary agents, are inundated with business plans; Michael Frank of Advanced Technology Ventures said he expects to receive 10,000 this year. They prefer short plans. Write it on a napkin, suggested Craig Johnson of Venture Law Group: “Length is an inverse predictor of success.” They very rarely invest if the plan arrives without a referral from someone they know; Frank said he never had, and neither had Chip Hazard of Greylock, another venture firm.

Much of the day’s discourse was similarly packaging- and process-oriented. Instead of asking venture capitalists and entrepreneurs about hot markets or finding that first batch of customers, Mary Ann Cusenza of Garage.com asked this “Swingers”-inspired question: After presenting to a venture capitalist, how long do you wait before you call?

Though questions like that seemed to skirt the essence of what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, Garage.com seems to be in tune with its audience. The previous two Bootcamp events, both held in the Bay Area, had sold out, as did this one, with 700 attendees who each paid as much as $895 for the two-day conclave. Garage.com marketing director Geoff Baum told me that the company was planning six Bootcamps for next year, and would expand to some new cities, like Seattle, New York and Austin. Though the initial business plan for Garage.com didn’t include a conference arm, “it will be a significant portion of our revenue this year,” said Baum.

And the audience at the Boston Bootcamp seemed to feel they were being given insider info. Few people I spoke to expressed disappointment at the “just add water” nature of much of the advice. Justin Mabey, a 22-year-old college student who is starting a company called I-moments.com in Provo, Utah, came to learn the steps to the V.C. dance, as did aspiring entrepreneurs I met from Atlanta and Maryland and Virginia and Singapore, who all seemed to feel that two days at this conference would grant them admission to the dance hall - or at least the chutzpah to crash it.

But in addition to this group, who hoped that by having the right number of PowerPoint slides (12) in their presentation, they would gain entree to the world of Yahoo and eBay and Cisco, there were people with x’s in the upper-right corners of their nametags (“No idea yet, not seeking funding”), and people with only the vaguest notions of what product or service their prospective start-up would offer, and why anyone would be interested.

These were the start-up fantasists, whose imaginations were fueled by the relentless media gong-banging about struggling entrepreneurial misfits who’d been magically transformed into billionaires by the VCs and investment bankers. “GetRich.com: Secrets of the New Silicon Valley” was the cover story of the Sept. 27 issue of Time magazine. A copy of Forbes handed out at Bootcamp bore a picture of the billionaire founder of Portal Software astride his mountain bike. The subhead: “A mass affluent class emerges in America. So what’s it take to be rich?”

These guys wanted to find out. They were here to learn just how to enact the rallying cry that graced the Bootcamp T-shirt: “Start up, kick butt, cash out.”

While the Internet industry’s first five years were populated by people with a passion for the medium or a business idea that kept them up at night and couldn’t have existed were it not for the Web, now that they’ve attained mainstream celebrity, it seems there are thousands of people out there who don’t have the next killer idea up their sleeve, but simply want to be like Jeff or Marc or Pierre (Amazon’s Bezos, Netscape’s Andreessen, and eBay’s Omidyar, of course). Even Baum, the Garage.com marketing director, estimated that 20 percent of the Bootcamp attendees weren’t really conversant with Internet technology, but had daydreams about one day quitting their jobs and starting their own dot-com. “There’s totally that element here,” he said.

Garage.com doesn’t seem to object to it, either. In the world of writers perpetually on the verge of writing the great American novel, there’s a healthy market for conferences designed to help find an agent, books that teach how to package a proposal, magazines like Writer’s Digest that explain how to craft a query letter and author Q&A’s like the ones I grew up attending, addressing the issue of whether publishers turn up their noses at 24-pound paper. Many of those writers never finish, and some never start their books — but they’re instrumental to the industry, which is happy to encourage their fantasies. The same dynamic is shaping up in the world of high tech, and with its Bootcamp conferences, Garage.com has tapped into it earlier than anyone else.

At lunch, I shared a table with Don Peterson, president of Framecast Communications, a Lenexa, Kan., company that is developing tools that colleges and prep schools can use for their Web sites. Peterson is a gregarious fellow, though when he’s not talking, he looks stern, with spiky salt-and-pepper hair and a flat, deeply lined face. Before starting Framecast, he started and sold a company called DeskStation Technology, which made high-end Windows NT workstations and servers. And before that, he was a sales executive at Advanced Micro Devices, a chip maker that competes with Intel. He said he was here
because he was a fan of Kawasaki’s, but that he’d been thinking about leaving early.

“I’m not sure you can teach people how to start a company,” Peterson said. “Everyone would like to think there’s an easy formula, but there’s not. It’s hard, hard work.”

I told Peterson that the Bootcamp had reminded me of the sessions I’d attended as a youngster, where the audience pressed authors for their advice: to bind or not to bind. He thought about it for a second, and said, “Yes, and even if that [advice] works for you, if you get published, that’s not even half the battle. You have to fight to get shelf space in the bookstores, to get reviews. You have to sell your book.”

Around the table, two of our fellow entrepreneurs were planning a sortie to the dessert table, and the other one was flirting with two attractive young women who had helped to plan the event. I asked Peterson how many of the attendees would have living, breathing companies by this time next year.

“One percent,” he said.

That estimate, to me, seemed a bit dour. But what I didn’t doubt was that Garage.com would have no problem filling seats at its Bootcamps next year, and the year after — as long as people continued to enjoy imagining themselves as the high-stepping CEOs of their very own Internet start-ups, knowing all the right steps, mamboing their way to the IPO.

So why, then, write “Weaving the Web,” Berners-Lee’s account of how and why he devised the most important new communications medium since television? A central motivation, apparently, was to forever alleviate his frustrations with journalists and members of the public who insist on learning the particulars of the Web’s origins.

“This book is written to address all the questions people ask me, whether they meet me in a bookstore or ask me to make a keynote speech at a conference,” he explains on his site. “From ‘What were you thinking when you invented it?’ through ‘So what do you think of it now?’ to ‘Where is this all going to take us?’ this is the story.”

Given that Berners-Lee isn’t exactly a candidate for “The New Hollywood Squares,” I found myself wondering exactly who was pestering him in bookstores and at conferences. A friend pointed out, though, that Berners-Lee is the Ricky Martin of techie circles; wherever he goes, he draws a crowd.

“Weaving the Web” seems to be directed at just that crowd. It’s a worthwhile if rather disappointing read for those interested in the genesis story of the Web and Berners-Lee’s hopes for its future development. It offers more insight into Berners-Lee and the Web’s pre-commercial days than anything yet published. But Berners-Lee evinces little joy in writing about himself and his creative process — he’s no Richard Feynman.

As a book, “Weaving the Web” is part history, part manifesto, part autobiography. That unusual amalgam is hinted at by the book’s unwieldy subtitle: “The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web By Its Inventor.” The history section works best, as Berners-Lee has never before told his version of the Web’s birth and tenuous toddlerhood. Later sections read like an operating handbook for the World Wide Web Consortium and a highly detailed outline of the new protocols and features Berners-Lee believes the Web needs. This is not, in other words, stuff that a general business reader will lap up.

From the book’s start, Berners-Lee is determined not to cast himself as the Web’s omnipotent creator. (On his FAQ, he insists that the exact date of his birth in 1955 is “not available” — worrying, no doubt, that someone would organize an embarrassing global birthday observance.) It’s just not his style — even if Berners-Lee can lay much stronger claim to the Father of the Web title than, say, Vint Cerf can to Father of the Internet, or even Thomas Edison could to Father of the Light Bulb.

Berners-Lee’s selflessness contributed, no doubt, to the Web’s weed-like dissemination and growth. “As technologists and entrepreneurs were launching or merging companies to exploit the Web, they seemed fixated on one question: ‘How can I make the Web mine?’” writes Michael Dertouzos in the book’s foreword. (Dertouzos was present at the birth of the Internet, and he is now the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lab for Computer Science, where Berners-Lee helps run the World Wide Web Consortium.) “Meanwhile, Tim was asking, ‘How can I make the Web yours?’”

But that same selflessness makes much of Berners-Lee’s book read as though it had been written by a third party, and not by the inventor himself. (Maybe that co-writer played a bigger part than he’s credited with.) We get exactly one paragraph about Berners-Lee’s boyhood in London: His parents, both mathematicians, developed the Mark I, the world’s first commercial, stored-program computer, at Manchester University. Racing to get past the section on his youth, he mentions that one evening, he came home from high school to find his father “reading books on the brain, looking for clues about how to make a computer intuitive, able to complete connections as the brain did.” That gets the teenage Berners-Lee thinking about how “computers could become much more powerful if they could be programmed to link otherwise unconnected information” — a line of thinking that eventually led to the Web.

There’s nothing more, though, about an upbringing that, according to published profiles of Berners-Lee, included math games at the breakfast table and make-believe computers made of cardboard boxes; and there’s just one sentence in which the ever-humble author admits to building his first real computer from an old television and a primitive M6800 microprocessor while studying physics at Oxford University. I wasn’t expecting a breathy, code-and-tell book from Berners-Lee, but it would’ve been interesting to learn more about his education and the environment he was raised in. Photos (published elsewhere) from his college days, for example, are intriguing, showing the shaggy-haired Berners-Lee wielding a soldering iron; clearly, the urge to tinker is central to his personality.

After two post-college jobs, Berners-Lee jumped to a “brief software consulting job” at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. (He wound up staying for nearly 14 years.) There, his ideas about linking unconnected information began to mature. The first evidence of that was a program called Enquire, written to help Berners-Lee “remember the connections among the various people, computers, and projects at the lab.”

Before long, Berners-Lee began thinking how much more powerful Enquire would be if it contained links to information stored on any computer anywhere. At CERN, researchers used a motley assortment of computer equipment, and Berners-Lee’s original proposal for what became the Web envisioned a system that would let the researchers share documents across any of the machines, whether they were PCs, Macs, Unix boxes or even a NeXT workstation, Berners-Lee’s platform of choice. Because CERN was such a heterogeneous computing environment, the Web from the start would be friendly to all kinds of different systems.

The proposal was shelved twice; CERN, it seems, was more interested in particle physics than information technology. Berners-Lee was persistent, though, and he eventually got a half-hearted go-ahead. Still, writing the first Web browser and server software was an easier task than convincing anyone at CERN to start using it. It wasn’t until Berners-Lee ported the center’s phone book to the Web and held a series of seminars introducing researchers and the support staff to the new set of protocols that a handful of people began adopting them. Once he introduced the Web to the alt.hypertext newsgroup, though, it really began to take off.

“I began to get e-mail from people who tried to install the software,” Berners-Lee writes. “They would give me bug reports, and ‘wouldn’t it be nice if …’ reports. And there would be the occasional ‘Hey, I’ve just set up a server, and it’s dead cool. Here’s the address.” With reminiscences like that, you get a sense that it must’ve been pretty exciting for Berners-Lee to watch his invention catch fire.

Once others got involved in writing browsers and servers and other software for the Web, Berners-Lee began to feel his control slip; the medium was no longer his own personal project. The inventor’s early interactions with Mosaic developer (and eventual Netscape co-founder) Marc Andreessen were particularly tense. “[Andreessen] was always talking about Mosaic, often with hardly a mention of the World Wide Web,” writes Berners-Lee. “The people at NCSA [the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign] were attempting to portray themselves as the center of Web development, and to basically rename the Web as Mosaic. At NCSA, something wasn’t ‘on the Web,’ it was ‘on Mosaic.’” Berners-Lee’s alarm comes through loud and clear; it’s one of the few points in the book where the reader gets the sense that Berners-Lee felt some possessiveness, some personal attachment to the Web.

Ultimately, that pride of authorship paled in comparison to Berners-Lee’s desire to make the Web ubiquitous. He successfully crusaded to convince CERN’s directors to put the Web protocol into the public domain, without royalties or any strings attached. Then, he left CERN to form the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT and supervise the evolution of those protocols, while trying to ensure that no single company commandeered the Web for its own purposes.

Why didn’t Berners-Lee cash in on his invention? That’s apparently one of the questions he’s asked most frequently, and one that irks him like no other. “What is maddening is the terrible notion that a person’s value depends on how important and financially successful they are, and that that is measured in terms of money. That suggests disrespect for the researchers across the globe developing ideas for the next leaps in science and technology,” he writes. He does admit, though, that he considered options aside from being the Web’s standards czar, like starting a company or joining the research group of an already established firm in the private sector. But, he says, “My primary mission was to make sure that the Web I had created would continue to evolve. There were still many things that could have gone wrong.”

Much of the second half of “Weaving the Web” delves into the organizational structure and process intricacies of the W3C, as the World Wide Web Consortium came to be called. It is hardly riveting. But the book retains just enough forward motion, with a time line of important developments. It traces the browser wars, the Web’s adoption by consumers and businesses and the government’s confusion over how to regulate the new medium. We’re also treated to Berners-Lee’s opinions on numerous issues, like whether linking can be a violation of copyright and whether search engines should give advertisers preferential placement in a results set (no and no).

The book’s treatment of important W3C initiatives like the Platform for Internet Content Selection (which allows for labeling of objectionable content) and Resource Description Framework (an XML-based language that will help bots analyze information across multiple sites) are too detailed for the general reader. Berners-Lee’s belief, though, that better systems are needed for establishing a level of trust between two parties in a transaction is something that every Web shopper can relate to.

“Imagine an Oh Yeah? Button on a browser,” he writes. “There I am, looking at a fantastic deal that can be mine just for the entry of a credit-card number and the click of a button. I press the Oh Yeah? Button. My browser challenges the server to provide some credentials. Perhaps this is a list of documents with digitally signed endorsements from, say, the company’s bank and supplier, with the keys to verify them.”

Berners-Lee has an incredibly fertile mind, and those kind of musings are a treat. Like all great inventors, from Archimedes to Philo Farnsworth, he’s convinced that any obstacle can be overcome — just apply brain power and elbow grease. “Weaving the Web” finishes on an optimistic note that seems perfectly in tune with the author’s personality: If a grass-roots project like the Web can have such a tremendous impact on commerce and communication, then anything is possible, any problem is soluble.

While it’s not terribly powerful as a work of nonfiction, “Weaving the Web” does present a meaningful new model for an inventor in the era of open-source software. Rather than trying to own, license and control the invention — and ultimately limiting its potential and its breadth of use — Berners-Lee is the ego-free tinkerer who simply gives the world a bit of software and says: See what you can do with this. The initial germ of the idea doesn’t attain its true value until others have created content, written new browsers and servers and enabled commerce, chat, auctions and instant messaging.

Berners-Lee was already well aware of that back in 1996, when I spoke with him in his small Cambridge, Mass., office. After the snippy start, he warmed up and began talking effusively about his long-term vision for the Web. “Hopefully, in a few years’ time,” he said then, “people will stop talking about the Web as an application, and [instead] they’ll be talking about the Web like they talk about air and water. It’ll just be something you take for granted. It’s information space. And exciting things will be happening within that space.”

I would argue we’re already there.