On Dec. 12, 1991, Kunz set up a Web interface based on a Web server to search a popular database of particle physics literature at Stanford, and sent an email to Tim Berners-Lee about it. It was the first Web site in North America and one of the first dozen in the world.

Berners-Lee called Kunz’s site “the killer app” for the Web, because it helped bring the Web’s value home to a larger audience — in this case, physicists.

The nice folks at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center connected me with the now-retired Kunz to take a walk down memory lane.

Kunz was a physicist at SLAC who was a NeXT computer enthusiast, which is how he connected to Tim Berners-Lee, who was based at SLAC counterpart CERN in Switzerland.

Kunz didn’t realize at the time just how interesting the World Wide Web was. Berners-Lee begged Kunz to come visit him, and even after Kunz realized the potential of accessing the SLAC physics database (called SPIRES) in the fall of 1991, he took three months to make it happen. And then after the site was up, Kunz moved onto other projects and left maintenance of the site to a group at SLAC that called themselves the WWW Wizards.

But Kunz does remember when he first saw the potential of the Web, on that 1991 visit to Berners-Lee in Switzerland.

“Physicists from all of the world wanted to access SPIRES to do reference searches, and we’d have to physically log into the mainframe, which was a foreign operating system to most people, and then issue commands,” Kunz said. “You’d have to send us an email. And if you got a search term wrong, do it again to get it right. I saw the Web would make a much easier interface.”

At the time, Kunz asked Berners-Lee if such a thing would work well over the Internet, and Berners-Lee said sure, “but he couldn’t demonstrate because all the world’s Web servers were in the same building that his office was in,” Kunz recalled.

Kunz said that the 10-year anniversary of the SPIRES site back in 2001 was a much bigger deal. There was a reunion conference at SLAC and articles about SPIRES in some 25 newspapers across the world. This year, I was the only one who came calling, after a PR person from SLAC suggested it.

Twenty years later, Silicon Valley keeps making world-famous Web sites. It’s getting harder to remember a time before that was so.

Kunz, who bought a smartphone a couple years ago and joined Facebook last year, said his favorite Web innovation is online airline reservations.

Here are some more resources about the SPIRES site, put together by SLAC.

We all use the web now for all kinds of parts our lives, some trivial, some critical to our life as part of a social world. In the spirit going back to Magna Carta, we require a principle that: No person or organization shall be deprived of their ability to connect to others at will without due process of law, with the presumption of innocence until found guilty. Neither governments nor corporations should be allowed to use disconnection from the Internet as a way of arbitrarily furthering their own aims.

– World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee, speaking out against COICA (Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act)

As widely noted on that same Web today, it was 20 years ago on this date that Tim Berners-Lee declared the thing open for business.

In a statement that seemed bold at the time but now ranks as a dramatic understatement, Berners-Lee posted to a newsgroup that the new WWW project “merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system.”

Powerful, indeed.

In separate nostaligia, Google is marking what would have been Lucille Ball’s 100th birthday with a fun retro TV doodle that displays the Google name in “I Love Lucy”-style script and plays a few classic clips from the TV show. (Just click on the channel changer to see the different clips.)

This morning, the research and development company filed suit against nearly two dozen companies, accusing them of violating two of its patents–U.S. Patent No. 5,838,906, the same one Microsoft allegedly ran afoul of, and No. 7,599,985, an extension of the 906 patent that covers embedded apps using AJAX. Among the companies named in the suit: Adobe (ADBE), Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), eBay (EBAY), Google (GOOG)–including YouTube–Sun (JAVA) and Yahoo (YHOO).

“All we want is what’s fair,” Eolas Chairman Dr. Michael Doyle said in a statement. “We developed these technologies over 15 years ago and demonstrated them widely, years before the marketplace had heard of interactive applications embedded in Web pages tapping into powerful remote resources. Profiting from someone else’s innovation without payment is fundamentally unfair.”

Sadly, “what’s fair” in this case threatens the very fabric of the Web, as Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web argued back in 2003 when Eolas was pursuing Microsoft (MSFT). “The ’906 patent will cause cascades of incompatibility to ripple through the Web,” Berners-Lee said in an appeal to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. “[It] is a substantial setback for global interoperability and the success of the open Web.”

The answer’s obvious isn’t it? Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff.

Why? Because he says so, that’s why.

Speaking at the company’s DreamForce Europe event, Benioff said that Web 3.0 will be the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) era. A fascinating definition–convenient too, since this is precisely the sort of business Salesforce.com (CRM) is in. “We think Web 3.0 is now upon us. It’s the era of platforms,” said Benioff. “New platforms are coming right out of the cloud. It’s time to make a choice. You can continue to build your applications in the software model or you can move your applications to the new model of cloud computing. There is a new way to build your applications.”

So Web 3.0 is not, as Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, once suggested, the semantic Web–”day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives handled by machines talking to machines.” Rather, it’s Web 2.0 with another 1.0’s worth of marketing BS. The “Whatever-I-Say-It-Is Web”–the “Al Franken Decade” of the Internet age.

Well, the “me” decade is almost over, and good riddance, and far as I’m concerned. … That’s right. I believe we’re entering what I like to call the Al Franken Decade. Oh, for me, Al Franken, the ’80s will be pretty much the same as the ’70s. I’ll still be thinking of me, Al Franken. But for you, you’ll be thinking more about how things affect me, Al Franken. When you see a news report, you’ll be thinking, ‘I wonder what Al Franken thinks about this thing?’, ‘I wonder how this inflation thing is hurting Al Franken?’ And you women will be thinking, ‘What can I wear that will please Al Franken?’, or ‘What can I not wear?’ You know, I know a lot of you out there are thinking, ‘Why Al Franken?’ Well, because I thought of it, and I’m on TV, so I’ve already gotten the jump on you.”

People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you’ve got an overlay of scalable vector graphics–everything rippling and folding and looking misty–on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you’ll have access to an unbelievable data resource.”

–Tim Berners-Lee, May 2006

Web 2.0 is well documented and talked about. The power of the Net reached a critical mass, with capabilities that can be done on a network level. We are also seeing richer devices over the last four years and richer ways of interacting with the network, not only in hardware like game consoles and mobile devices, but also in the software layer. You don’t have to be a computer scientist to create a program. We are seeing that manifest in Web 2.0 and 3.0 will be a great extension of that, a true communal medium … the distinction between professional, semiprofessional and consumers will get blurred, creating a network effect of business and applications.”

–Jerry Yang, co-founder and CEO of Yahoo, November 2006

“Web 1.0 was dial-up, 50K average bandwidth, Web 2.0 is an average one megabit of bandwidth and Web 3.0 will be 10 megabits of bandwidth all the time, which will be the full video Web, and that will feel like Web 3.0.”

–Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix, November 2006

Had to happen sooner or later, right? The lexicographers who gave us the term Web 2.0 have finally gotten around to issuing an “official” definition of Web 3.0 and, having undoubtedly scurried to trademark the term, are probably already plotting the pricey industry conference that will accompany it.

So what is Web 3.0, “officially”?

Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.”
–Jason Calacanis

In other words it’s Web 2.0 2.0, Web 2.0 with another 1.0′s worth of marketing BS. Or, as Josh Kopelman, managing director of First Round Capital, aptly puts it, “any Internet-based company that has launched after 2004.“

I guess Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, was right: Nobody even knows what Web 2.0 means.

“It was very surprising to see just how small a group uses the full potential of modern information and communication technology and just how large a group hardly uses it at all,” John B. Horrigan, Pew’s associate director for research, told the Dallas Morning News. “I read and hear so much about people who write blogs and post pictures on Flickr and watch TV on their cellphones; I expected them to be a much larger group than they actually are.”