[Here's a reply I sent when this message was cross posted to the internet researchers' list a few days ago - looks like it was held up on its way to SIGCIS. This one I know the answer to. As I wrote in a footnote to "The Web's Missing Links: Search Engines and Portals" in *The Internet and American Business*, edited by William Aspray and Paul Ceruzzi, MIT Press, 2008:159-200: The idea of a home page went back to Tim Berners-Lee and the origin of the Web. Berners-Lee had imagined that browsers would include integrated editing capabilities, so that each user would have a personal home page that he or she could edit to include links to pages of interest as well as public messages for other visitors. (Something rather like a blog). This explains the dual meaning of the term home page as both "the default start page for someone's browser" and "the main page holding information about a person or company." James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, How the Web Was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 193-4. Remember that TBL's original browser could edit web pages as well as display them. (This was easy to implement on his NeXT computer because of its library of powerful, reusable object tools). In his original scheme the home page would fulfill the same function that bookmarks were used for in later browsers, but would be shared with everyone on the web. Thinking about how the web would have developed if this integrated editing capability had been retained is an interesting exercise. In fact the edit capability vanished from Mosaic, the first widely used browser. Browsing and editing were done with different tools, and bookmarks were private. Browser makers configured home page defaults to point to their own websites. Many early personal home pages really did include a mixture of links to recommended sites and information about their owners. You could argue that making this list of favorite pages public prefigured more recent social media innovations such as the "like" button. TBL discusses his original browser at http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html, including a screenshot at http://www.w3.org/History/1994/WWW/Journals/CACM/screensnap2_24c.gif. He writes The "Link" menu you can see. "Mark all" would remember the URI of where you were. "MArk selection" would make an anchor (link target) for the selected text, give it an ID, and remember the URI of that fragment. "Link to Marked" would make a link from the current selection to whatever URI you had last marked. So making a link involved browsing to somewhere interesting, hitting Command/M, going to the document you were writing and selecting some text, and hitting Command/L. "Link to new" would create a new window, prompt for a URI (ugh - it should have made one up!) and make a link from the selection to the new document. You never saw the URIs - you could of course always find documents by following the link to them. However the ability to save the edited page directly to the web server was not implemented. It would browse http:space and news: and ftp: spaces and localfile: space, but edit only in file: space as HTTP PUT was not implemented back then. More on the history of web browsers in Thomas Haigh, "Protocols for Profit: Web and E-mail Technologies as Product and Infrastructure" in *The Internet and American Business*, edited by William Aspray and Paul Ceruzzi, MIT Press, 2008: 105-158 (preprint http://www.tomandmaria.com/tom/Writing/ProtocolsForProfitDRAFT.pdf) and on the history of web navigation in "The Web's Missing Links: Search Engines and Portals" [in the same volume]:159-200 (preprint http://www.tomandmaria.com/tom/Writing/WebsMissingLinksDRAFT.pdf). Also, of course, in *How the Web Was Born* cited above. Best wishes, Tom Haigh www.tomandmaria.com/tom