My name is Craig Conway - The Computerworld Honors Program

DSM: Were you married at all during this period?
TBL: My first wife Jane I met at Oxford. We got married after and she and I both went
to Plessey, she was working in another division.
The Proton Synchrotron Connection
DSM: Mid-1979’ to 81’ you were an independent consultant, and between June and
December of 80’ you hadf your first job at CERN. I think in the earlier interview we
pretty well covered your developing “Enquire” there, any particular story that you would
like to talk about?
TBL: Well, I don’t know how you mix this in with the rest but the geography of the
Proton Synchrotron lab was that there was this thing like a warehouse, like a factory floor
with a catwalk around it, the second floor level. And the control room for the Proton
Synchrotron booster, which was part of the particle accelerator, which was buried in the
hill, was actually attached to the walkway, off the catwalk on the other side. So if you came
out of the terminal room, the control room or the computer rooms were off this catwalk.
To get to the offices you would walk along the catwalk to get to the corner of the building.
The offices, the corridors continued into two other lengths of the building, which went off
in different directions. So this was a meeting place in the corridors. There, there was a
very strategically placed coffee place where you could buy a coffee and croissant at the right
time of day. So they had standing-height little tables. Sort of mushroom like tables which,
because there wasn’t a lot of space, they were kept on either side of the corridor. So this
turned out to be a great communications system. They later took it apart. I don’t know if,
maybe it was fire regulations. But the neat thing about it when it was functioning was that
everybody, to get to the terminal room; at that point the terminals were in the terminal
room, we didn’t have them in offices, so to get around people were always walking across
there. So you could, if you were talking, there would be a stream of people and you could
pluck them out of the flow and bring them into the conversation. That is how you would
tell somebody what to do, ask somebody what to do. They would bring in other people
and you would have an ad-hoc meeting. You would get a coffee and croissant and sit
around and chat. And there was a lot of informal chat and there was also, “You really need
to know the posscom to order the global variable on some other computer on the PSC
computer or something. Martin knows what it’s called. Martin! (snaps fingers) Hey
Martin come over here. What did you call that global variable which was the posscom
number? It’s not the posscom number? It’s the posscom number plus three? There you
go. Didn’t I say you should talk to Martin and ask Martin when you could read it and
when you could not read it?” All this information about how these systems worked was
sort of loosely coupled by these computers, which could all talk to each other. You could
read variables on the computer and you could send programs to run on another computer.
So a very, very, potentially disorganized system was organized by peoples’ heads and the
connections made at this coffee space.
Tim Berners-Lee
Oral History
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