It was the academic community who wired up their universities so it was put together by smart, well-meaning people who thought it was a good idea.

The more you enter, the more you become locked in. Your social-networking site becomes a central platform - a closed silo of content, and one that does not give you full control over your information in it. The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use, the more the Web becomes fragmented, and the less we enjoy a single, universal information space.

That idea of URL was the basic clue to the universality of the Web. That was the only thing I insisted upon.

The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information.

Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.

The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect - to help people work together - and not as a technical toy.

One way to think about the magnitude of the changes to come is to think about how you went about your business before powerful Web search engines. You probably wouldn't have imagined that a world of answers would be available to you in under a second. The next set of advances will have an different effect, but similar in magnitude.