Sometime in early 1994, while Rob and I were immersed in building ArtNet on the ResNova bulletin board system, I received a phone call from a man I had never met.

His name was Jon Schull.

Jon was a professor at the University of Rochester, but that title hardly described him. He had an infectious curiosity and an easy charm that immediately put people at ease. Somehow he had heard about what Rob and I were doing in New York. We weren’t famous. We weren’t even on the Internet yet. But Jon recognized that something unusual was happening.

He mentioned, almost in passing, that he would be in New York the following day. Would I be able to meet him for lunch at the Crystal Court in the World Trade Center?

Of course I said yes.

I don’t remember exactly what we talked about first. I remember feeling as though I had met another person who spent his life looking over the horizon instead of at his feet. Jon wasn’t interested in technology for its own sake. He was interested in what technology made possible.

By then I had become comfortable inside the world of bulletin board systems. Through ResNova, Rob and I had built a growing community of artists who could exchange ideas, images, and conversations. It felt revolutionary.

Jon smiled.

Then he opened another door.

He introduced me to something called the World Wide Web.

Compared to the polished interface we had built in ResNova, the early Web looked primitive. Pages were little more than text with blue hyperlinks scattered across them. There were almost no graphics, almost no design, and certainly none of the sense of place that Rob and I had worked so hard to create.

At first, I wasn’t impressed.

Then Jon explained what I was really looking at.

Unlike a bulletin board system, this wasn’t a destination owned by one person or one company. Anyone could create a page. Anyone could link to anyone else. Instead of isolated communities, there could be one enormous, interconnected world.

Suddenly I understood.

The Web wasn’t another bulletin board.

It was the next landscape.

Jon showed me a handful of HTML tags and how surprisingly simple it was to create a page. The mechanics hardly mattered. What mattered was realizing that this new medium was open. It belonged to no one and potentially to everyone.

As we talked, I realized something else.

Jon hadn’t come to New York to teach me HTML.

He had come because he recognized that Rob and I had already built something valuable. We had earned the attention of a community of artists who were eager to explore new ideas. Jon understood the Web. We understood artists.

We needed each other.

That recognition changed everything.

When lunch ended, I walked out into the noise of lower Manhattan feeling as though someone had quietly expanded the boundaries of my world.

We had a much bigger tiger by the tail than I had imagined.

I couldn’t wait to find Rob.

I wanted to tell him that the future had just become much larger.

As I hurried crosstown, I realized that was always my first instinct. Whenever I stumbled onto something extraordinary, I wanted to share it with the people I cared about. Rob was the first person I wanted to tell.

Together, we were about to discover just how big that tiger really was.