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"Invention to Phenomenon"

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium

Introduction

How did the Web grow from nothing to the scale it is at today? The story of the growth of the World Wide Web can be measured by the number of Web pages that are published and the number of links between pages. Starting with one page and one site just about 15 years ago, there are now over 100,000,000 websites with an estimated 8 billion publicly accessible pages as of 2005.

How did the web move from an invention to a phenomenal success, and how do we, society as a whole, plan for the future?

As the Web passes through its first decade of widespread use, to hear Sir Tim Berners-Lee examine the history and foundations of the World Wide Web. Although difficult to now understand a world without the web, this lecture will walk you through its roadmap, the past decade and the exciting developments we can expect to see in the near future.

About the Speaker

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

A graduate of Oxford University, England, Sir Tim Berners-Lee holds the 3Com Founders chair and is a Senior Research Scientist at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is co-Director of the new Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) and is a Chair in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton, UK.

Listed by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, Sir Tim Berners-Lee directs the World Wide Web Consortium, founded in 1994. In 1989 he invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread.

In 2001 he became a fellow of the Royal Society. He has been the recipient of several international awards including the Japan Prize, the Prince of Asturias Foundation Prize, the Millennium Technology Prize and Germany's Die Quadriga award. In 2004 he was knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth. He is the author of "Weaving the Web" and
was also named Greatest Briton of 2004 for his achievements.

Networking drinks reception

The lecture will be followed by a Networking Drinks Reception, which offers the participants the chance to meet fellow engineers and share experiences with those with similar interests in an informal setting. Please note delegates need to book and pay for the Drinks Reception in advance.

The History of the IET Pinkerton Lecture

"No corporate goal can ever succeed if it cannot also provide the ambitious individual with the challenges of extraordinary difficulty and the promise of self-fulfilment... nothing had so much meaning, relevance and truth as the set of values I saw in the early LEO days"
Leo Fantl, a member of the LEO team.

The transition from innovation to application is not always successfully made. An outstanding example of such a success was the development of LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) - the world's first computer designed for business applications.

In commemoration and honour of John Pinkerton, the pivotal engineer in this development, the Institution inaugurated this annual lecture. Arising from a vision within J Lyons, the catering company, for a radical improvement in its business operations, the LEO project started in 1949 and the system was brought into use in 1951. In this remarkably short time he and his small team turned the EDSAC, developed at the University of Cambridge, into a practical tool for business computing. The result transformed not only Lyons' administration, but by its example, that of many other organisations.

By 1955, Lyons had created the subsidiary company, LEO Computers Ltd, to manufacture and sell computers and included, amongst its first customers, the Ford Motor Company. The Pinkerton team went on to produce the commercially successful LEO range - fully engineered and enhanced with new ideas and technologies.

This was innovation driven by user need and guided by a remarkable man, who was able to inspire others - to which Leo Fantl's quote is admirable testimony. Crucially, Pinkerton recognised the importance of understanding how users operate and was able to work with them to achieve shared aims. As he said "... the simpler the conception and the design of any item of calculating equipment, the better it will be understood by the operators who use it and the engineers who maintain it."

Subsequent lectures in the series will take a perspective based on computer engineering but broad enough to invoke parallels from elsewhere, and will explore the steps along the path from innovation to application. Each lecture will aim to identify the processes involved in such a transition, analyse their ingredients and determine how they can be replicated.

Previous Lectures

2000 "Inaugural John Pinkerton Lecture"
Sir Maurice Wilkes, AT&T Research Laboratories

2001 "LEO and the Computer Revolution"
David Caminer OBE

2002 "Seizing the Moment: The Far Reaching Effects of Broadband on Economy and Society"
David Cleevely, Analysys Group

2004 "Intellectual Property, Entrepreneurs and Company successes"
Hermann Hauser, Director, Amadeus Capital Partners Ltd

2005 "ICT Use in Rural India: Innovations Bridge the Digital Chasm"
Professor Subhash Bhatnagar, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad

2006 e-Science and Cyberinfrastructure
Professor Tony Hey, VP Scientific Computing, Microsoft, USA