MIlbourne Lodge pupils meet : Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Milbourne Lodge pupils

This afternoon a group of our older pupils travelled to Wellington College to hear Sir Tim Berners-Lee speak .  We arrived early (which gave us a chance to have a tour of the wonderful new library at Wellington ) and were seated right at the front of the huge marquee. 

Having talked about his own childhood and education, how lucky he was that his parents were both involved with - and therefore introduced him to - computers and how he Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were all born in the same year at just the right time for the explosion of modern computers and computing, he then went on to describe his work at CERN and the advent of the World Wide Web.

Sir Tim spoke of how much of his initial work on the World Wide Web was completed in his free time - and of how he used a NeXT computer to create the first web browser.

Having spoken for some thirty minutes he then invited questions from the floor : Khusrau Islam (L6a) asked why he hadn't 'patented' the World Wide Web .  Sir Tim explained that had he tried to persuade people to pay for using the World Wide Web he doubted if he would have been able to get them to adopt the system : and there probably would have been other people trying to come up with alternatives. Timmy Parker (L6b)  asked him what had inspired him -  to which Sir Tim replied that he had wanted to find a solution to the problem that although the computers he was working with at CERN were physically connected to each other, they didn't talk to each other.  This was his challenge to find a way that what each computer could do could be shared

He spoke too of the importance of young people learning to programme, and finally of the importance of remembering and promoting the principles of openness and universal access on which the Internet was built.


At the end of the lecture he even took the time to be photographed with, shake hands with and sign autographs for our group.   Our thanks to Wellington College for the invitation and to Sir Tim Berners-Lee for such an excellent and inspirational talk.

Leo Zunz, Nick Woollhead, Mr Stephen Ilett

Finally, it was great too to meet up with Leo Zunz and Nick Woollhead two Old Milbournians (both currently in the Lower Sixth at Wellington College) who came to chat with us following the lecture.