The day I turned down Tim BernersLee Ian Ritchie

well we all know the world wide web is

absolutely transformed publishing

broadcasting Commerce and social

connectivity the where did it all come

from

and I’ve quote three people Vannevar

Bush Doug Engelbart and Tim berners-lee

so let’s just run through these guys

this is Vannevar Bush Vannevar Bush was

the US government’s chief scientific

adviser during the war and in 1945 he

published an article in a magazine

called Atlantic Monthly and the article

was called as we may think and what

Vannevar Bush was saying was the way we

use information is broken we we don’t

work in terms of libraries and catalog

systems and so forth the brain works by

association with one item in its thought

is snaps to insulator the next item and

the way information is structured is

totally incapable of keeping up with

this process and so he suggested a

machine and he called that the Memex and

the Memex would link information one

piece of information to a related piece

of information and so forth now this was

in 1945 a computer in those days was

something that Secret Service’s just

used for code breaking and it was

absolutely you know nobody knew anything

about it so this was before the computer

was invented and he proposed this

machine called the Memex and he had a

platform where you linked information to

other information and then you could

call it up at will so spitting forward

one of the guys who read this article

was a guy called Doug Engelbart and he

was a US Air Force officer and he was

reading it in a library in the Far East

and he was so inspired by this article

it kind of directed the rest of his life

and by the mid-60s he was able to put

this into action when he worked at the

Stanford Research Lab in California

he built a system a system was designed

to augment human intelligence it was

called and in a premonition of today’s

world of cloud computing and software as

a service the system was called

nls for online system and this is a dog

anger bar he was giving a presentation

at the fall joint computer conference in

1968 when he showed he sat on a stage

like this and he demonstrated this

system he had his head make like I’ve

got and he watch this system

you can see his working between

documents and graphics and so forth and

he’s driving at all with this this

platform here with a Fivefinger keyboard

and the world’s first computer mouse

which he specially designed in order to

do this system so this is where the most

came from as well so it’s with Doug

Engelbart the trouble with Doug

Engelbart system was the the computers

in those days cost several million

pounds so for a personal computer you

know a few million pounds was like a

personal jet plane it wasn’t really very

practical but spin on to the 80s when

personal computers did arrive then there

was room for this kind of system on

personal computers and my company owl

built a system called gate for the Apple

Macintosh and we delivered the world’s

first hypertext system and this began to

get ahead of Steven Apple introduced a

thing called HyperCard

they made a bit of fuss about it they

had a 12-page subsequent in the Wall

Street Journal that they launched the

magazine started to cover it byte

magazine communications of the ACM had

special issues covering hypertext and we

developed a PC version of this product

as well as the Macintosh version and our

PC version became quite mature these are

some examples of the system in action in

the late 80s

you were able to deliver documents we

were able to do over networks we

developed the system so it had a markup

language based on HTML we call the HTML

hypertext markup language and the system

was capable of doing very very large

documentation systems over computer

networks so I do this system to a trade

show in Versailles near Paris in late

November 1990 and it was a fruit by a

nice young man called Tim berners-lee

who say the you Ian Ritchie I said yeah

and he said I need to talk to you and he

told me about his proposed system called

the World Wide Web and I thought well

that’s kind of pretentious name it’s

basically the whole system ran out his

computer in his office but he was

completely convinced that his world wide

web would take over the world one day

and I tried to persuade me to write the

browser for it because his system didn’t

have any graphics or fonts or Lea or

anything it was just just plain text and

I thought well you know interesting but

a guy from Satan he’s not going to do

this so we we didn’t do it in the next

couple of years the hypertext community

didn’t recognize him either in 1992 his

paper was rejected for the hypertext

conference

in 1993 there was a table at the

conference in Seattle and a guy called

Marc Andreessen was demonstrating his

little browser for the World Wide Web

and I saw it and I thought yep

that’s it and the very next year in 1984

we had the conference here in Edinburgh

and I had no opposition and having Tim

berners-lee as the keynote speaker so

that puts me in pretty illustrious

company with a guy called dick Rowe who

was a Decca Records and turned down the

Beatles there was a guy called gary

kildall who went flying his plane when

IBM came looking for an operating system

for the IBM PC and he wasn’t there so

they went back to see Bill Gates and the

12 publishers who turned down JK

Rowling’s Harry Potter I guess on the

other hand there’s Marc Andreessen who

wrote the world’s first roser for the

world wide web and according to Fortune

magazine he’s worth 700 million dollars

but is he happy