was always interested in languages and different cultures, so I
learned some Russian, French and Chinese along the way. In late 1995, I created
on the Web The Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet and tried to
summarize there the brief history, linguistic and phonetic features, writing
system and computer processing aspects for each of the six major languages of
the world, in English and Japanese. As I gained more experience, I invited my
two associates to help me write a book on viewing, understanding and creating
multilingual web pages, which was published in August 1997 as The Multilingual
Web Guide, in a Japanese edition, the world's first book on such a subject.

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

Thousands of years ago, in Egypt, China and elsewhere, people were more
concerned about communicating their laws and thoughts not in just one language,
but in several. In our modern world, most nation states have each adopted one
language for their own use. I predict greater use of different languages and
multilingual pages on the Internet, not a simple gravitation to American
English, and also more creative use of multilingual computer translation. 99% of
the websites created in Japan are written in Japanese.

JOHN MARK OCKERBLOOM (Pennsylvania)

#Founder of The On-Line Books Page, listing freely-available online books

The On-Line Books Page lists over 12,000 freely-available online books in
English. It was founded in 1993 by John Mark Ockerbloom, who the same year
started the website of the CMU CS (Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science).
In 1998, John graduated from Carnegie Mellon (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) with a
Ph.D. in computer science. He has now moved to Penn (University of
Pennsylvania), where he works with the library and the computer science
department doing digital library research and development. The On-Line Books
Page also joined Penn's digital library, and John hopes it can be greatly
expanded and upgraded while being integrated with other digital library
resources.

*Interview of September 2, 1998

= How did your website begin?

I was the original Webmaster here at CMU CS, and started our local Web in 1993.
The local Web included pages pointing to various locally developed resources,
and originally The On-Line Books Page was just one of these pages, containing
pointers to some books put online by some of the people in our department.
(Robert Stockton had