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