The day I turned down Tim Berners-Lee - Ian Ritchie

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Well, we all know the worldwide web has absolutely transformed publishing, broadcasting, commerce, and social connectivity. But where did it all come from? I'll quote three people: Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart, and Tim Berners-Lee.

So let's just run through these guys. This is Vannevar Bush. Vannevar was the US government's Chief Scientific Adviser during the war, and in 1945, he published an article in a magazine called Atlantic Monthly. The article was called "As We May Think," and what Vannevar Bush was saying was that the way we use information is broken. 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, it snaps instantly to the item, and the way information is structured is totally incapable of keeping up with this process.

He suggested a machine, and he called it the MX. The MX 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 services used for code breaking, and absolutely nobody knew anything about it. So this was before the computer was invented, and he proposed this machine called MX, where you could link information to other information, and then you could call it up at will.

So spinning forward, one of the guys who read this article was a guy called Doug Engelbart. He was a US Air Force officer, and he was reading it in a library in the Far East. He was so inspired by this article that it kind of directed the rest of his life. 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 designed to augment human intelligence.

It was called NLS, which stood for Online System. In a premonition of today's world of cloud computing and software as a service, the system was called NLS. This is Doug Engelbart giving a presentation at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in 1968. What he showed, he sat on a stage like this and demonstrated this system. He had his head mic like I’ve got, and he worked with this system. You can see he’s working between documents, graphics, and so forth, and he’s driving it all with this platform, here, with a five-finger keyboard and the world's first computer mouse, which he specially designed in order to do this system. So, this is where the mouse came from as well.

The trouble with Doug Engelbart's system was that the computers in those days cost several million pounds. So for a personal computer, you know, a few million pounds would get you 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. My company, Owl, built a system called Guide for the Apple Macintosh, and we delivered the world's first hypertext system. This began to get ahead of steam. Apple introduced a thing called HyperCard, and they made a bit of fuss about it. They had a 12-page supplement in the Wall Street Journal the day it launched. The magazine started to cover it; Byte magazine and Communications with ACM had special issues covering hypertext.

We developed a PC version of this product as well, alongside the Macintosh version, and our PC version became quite matured. These are some examples of the system in action in the late '80s. You were able to deliver documents; we were able to do it over networks. We developed a system such that it had a markup language based on HTML. We called it HML: Hypertext Markup Language. The system was capable of doing very, very large documentation systems over computer networks.

So, I took this system to a trade show in Versailles, near Paris, in late November 1990. I was approached by a nice young man called Tim Berners-Lee, who said, "Are you E. J. Richie?" I said, "Yeah." And he said, "I need to talk to you." He told me about his proposed system called the Worldwide Web, and I thought, "Well, that’s kind of a pretentious name," especially since the whole system ran on his computer in his office. But he was completely convinced that his Worldwide Web would take over the world one day.

He tried to persuade me to write the browser for it because his system didn’t have any graphics or fonts or layout or anything—it was just plain text. I thought, "Well, you know, interesting, but a guy from S is not going to do this." So, 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 Worldwide Web. I saw it and thought, "Yep, that’s it."

The very next year, in 1994, we had the conference here in Edinburgh, and I had no opposition in having Tim Berners-Lee as a keynote speaker. So, that puts me in pretty illustrious company. There’s a guy called Dick Row, who was a DEC of Records and turned down the Beatles. There’s 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 Bill Gates and the 12 publishers who turned down J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter.

I guess, on the other hand, there’s Marc Andreessen who wrote the world's first browser for the Worldwide Web, and according to Fortune Magazine, he’s worth $700 million. But is he happy?

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