Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Computer Scientist

0:00Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury, that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds. Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else. I hope you enjoy listening.

0:46My cast away this week is the computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. The scale of his achievement is hard to overstate. The web has revolutionised everything from the global economy to politics, changing how we live as individuals and societies. Perhaps he was born to do it. His mathematician parents met at work. They were building one of the first computers, inspired by their contemporary friend Alan Turing. Tim grew up fascinated by electronics, and although he studied physics at Oxford, he spent his free time building a computer from an old television set. He moved to Switzerland to work at CERN, and it was there in 1989 that he published the paper that led to the birth of the web.

1:30In 1991, he created the first website. He was knighted in 2004 and appointed to the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II. In 2016, he was given the Turing Award, which finally earned him a place on his proud parents' fridge. He eschewed the chance to make gazillions from his invention, insisting that his employer didn't take royalties either. Instead, it should be, as he memorably wrote in lights that flickered round the stadium at the Olympic opening ceremony in 2012, for everyone. He says, I watched the web grow from something where people had very utopian dreams about it to something where I had to point out to them that this is just a reflection of humanity.

2:11Sir Tim Berners-Lee, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you so much for having me. Tim, we're delighted to have you here today. And I want to start with that Olympic moment because it was so special. You were invited by Danny Boyle to take part in the opening ceremony at London 2012 and it was celebrating British innovation throughout the years. What was his pitch to you? His pitch was that this wasn't just going to be a big boastful national thing. It was going to have a tongue in cheek. The humour in it was brilliant, the humour with Her Majesty coming down from a helicopter and so the whole spirit of it was tongue in cheek and it was a lot of fun.

2:50It's very moving to watch that opening ceremony back though. What was it like from your point of view? What was it like to be in the middle of that stadium and in the spotlight? I was in a house on the set. And I was hidden initially. And the house had a winch so they could lift it up. The house was about the size of this studio. So quite little then. Yeah, quite. You know, 10 feet by 10 feet, I guess. All the people who had been dancing in the previous act all came streaming through the front door of the house. And so on each one, they were all wearing different things and they'd each dance the dance of their life.

3:24and after that dance then there was my time when they winched up the house above me and then I typed out this is for everyone and hit return and then the words went all the way zooming around the stadium and around the world because we tweeted it as well. I love that. So this is for everyone. How did you settle on that phrase? Well, it was kind of obvious in a way. If you're going to summarise about the web the fact that it should be free it should be for everybody and if it's for everybody it has to be free. Were your family able to be there and share the night with you? Were they watching from the stands in the stadium?

4:02They were and the McCartney family were a few rows behind them in the stands and they were saying to their kids well they're waiting for Tim to come out just like you know and they were excited just like when we wait for Grandpa to come out. Do you know what? There's only you and Paul McCartney probably comparable achievements creating the Beatles and creating the web and what was it like for you being in the spotlight Tim? You know you are a self-described nerd so I'm guessing that's a strange place for you to be in some ways. How did it feel? Very proud actually because I was more or less the only computer scientist in the whole Olympics.

4:38So I was representing all of the nerds out there. Oh yeah doing it for the nerds. Love that. And what did you want viewers to take from that moment? You know those words like you say ricocheting around the stadium in lights. This is for everyone. You can take the word for granted most of the time, but then every now and again you may have to fight for it. You may have to fight for its openness. Well, that's something that we might come back to today, I think, because I know that's a big passion of yours. But let me ask you about another passion, music, because of course we're going to be hearing your discs.

5:10How important is music in your life? Music, I think, has been a constant thread from listening to records, I suppose, with mum and dad, going to Festival Hall, classical music when we're kids and then I'm not a good pianist or a good guitarist or a good harmonica player but I can keep myself occupied with various instruments. And do you see that musical creativity as being analogous to scientific creativity? Do you think they come from the same place? Well people say that don't they? They say that if you're a mathematician or a musician they're very close in the way your brain works What do you think?

5:47Maybe. I don't know. I do a lot of scientific experiments to prove that one way or the other. All right. Well, let's get stuck into your first discs at Tim Berners-Lee. Your first choice today. What is it and why are you taking it to the island with you? So my first choice is All Through the Night, which is a song that mum used to sing to us as a lullaby. And so I think for any of our family, it was one of her favourite songs. You were one of four, the eldest, right? I was the eldest of four, yes. OK, so would you all be tucked up and she would be singing this to you all at once, or did you get the individual treatment, what happened?

6:23I think we'd get the individual treatment. O算 damn

6:40go

7:23CHOIR SINGS So there's a Welsh connection with that first disc and that connects to your family, doesn't it? My mum had her Welsh grandmother, Mother Henry Jenkins. Your own creativity must have been inspired by your parents, Mary Lee and Conway. They were mathematicians, as I mentioned, and met working on one of the first commercially available computers. So that was the Ferranti Mark I, I think. Tell me a little bit about your mother. How would you describe her? Ooh, she had a twinkle in her eye. And she was shorter than people imagined after they'd talked to her on the phone. Lots of different facets to her, I suppose.

8:00At one point, she'd gone to Australia to work at the Mount Stromblo Observatory, helping them take photographs of the sky. She got a motorbike when she was out there, so she had a tent made from parachute material. I think her experience of being on a motorbike, going out in the bush in Australia gave her the feeling that she didn't really need anything else. She was tremendously self-sufficient. And I think partly going camping with the family again, you know if you're lying on the ground and there's only a tent between you and the planet and you know that's actually all you need. She sounds like she would have been a great castaway, doesn't she?

8:40I mean, absolutely extraordinary. And what a spirit of adventure and a pioneer too. So she got that job working on that early computer. But I know that when she did that, she realised that the women were being paid a lot less than the men. And she wouldn't stand for that. What happened? Well, I think none of them would stand for it. But they decided that Mary Lee would be the one to go and make the case to the bosses. And she made the case successfully. And so she got the pay of the women raised to be the same as the pay of the men. Well done, her. And what about as a parent? I think she described her mothering style as watchful negligence.

9:15over you and your siblings. So that meant being aware of us, but in general just letting us do whatever we wanted to a certain point. So a free-range childhood for you and your three siblings. There was lots of curiosity. And obviously, you know, an incredibly intelligent woman as well. I know that she constructed a calendar that I think is still on, is it your office wall? You have it. How exactly did it work? So it's like a clock. She'd have a sheet of cardboard and she made a clock with, instead of having the hours of the day around it, it had the days of the year around it. And so every year you'd move the hand by one notch to point to the next day.

9:54So 365 days instead of 60 minutes on this clock face. Yes. And then what would she have around it? All of the upcoming birthdays and holidays and things like that? Yep, everything coming up. And we've got these sheets of cardboard from each year where you can look back at what was happening. Oh, I love that. So a record of family life. And what about her career then? So a very busy family life, you and your three siblings to bring up. She stopped work when you were born and looked after you. How was she able to go back to work and resume what she was doing? Well, she fitted in part time at work.

10:24I think there was a sort of a wave of women starting to work from home when they had kids. What do you remember? What did she do? She was a consultant programmer. So she would code things. She would type up a program and five-hole punch tape. so that was the medium that the computer could read. You could hold this tape up to light and she could read what the programme would do just by looking at the light shining through the paper tape. And as a little boy, how much did you understand about what she was doing? This was a time when they were building the first computers, they were discussing what it actually meant.

11:01So an insurance was defining what a computer actually is. And so once you've defined that, because of the imitation game thing, that one computer can imitate another. In a way, anything you can do with your computer, I can do with my computer. So it's not a question of what the power of our computer is, it's only the question of the power of our imaginations. So I realised that that was a tremendous challenge. She and all her colleagues, all the people that sort of came back to dinner after work, they were excited about this sort of gauntlet that's thrown down to the whole community. What you can do with a computer is only limited by your imagination.

11:41So were you listening to those conversations at the top of the stairs then when they were having dinner? You bet. All right, Tim, let's have some more music. It's your second choice today. What are we going to hear? So this one is the irregular as performed by a band called The Daybreakers. And why have you chosen this today? So The Daybreakers album was one which we had around at home. It was folk music, so it was not classical music. songs that you could sing along to. And so checking in with my siblings, I think it was quite a formative thing for all of them. They could all remember the songs on this album.

12:16So I picked the first one, The E-Rai-E Canal. Oh, the E-Rai-E was rising and the gym was getting low. It's a good thing that we get a drink till we get to Buffalo. Till we get to Buffalo. We're 40 miles from Albany. Forget it, I never shall. What a terrible storm we had that night on the E-Rai-E Canal. Oh, the e-righ was rising and the gin was getting low A scarce good thing that we get a drink till we get to Buffalo Till we get to Buffalo The barge was full of barley and the crew, they were full of... Daybreakers and Erie Canal. I wonder about your parents' worldview, you know, being into folk in the 1950s and I'm imagining that lively dinner table that you described with their computer programmer friends, all of them discussing this new age that was coming.

13:07What kind of house was it to grow up in? For me, it was normal. I guess I was really lucky. My dad was also a big part of it. I discussed with him, for example, the question of the fact that computers are good at doing some things, doing things which are very regimented, doing things in tables, but they're not good at doing things in thinking random things. So I think that there was a discussion with Dad, partly may have sown some seeds. He revised speeches for Battle de Ferranti. the head of the company. Rather than front, he would give these speeches and in fact he was dead as a writer. It was your dad's vision of where the company should go.

13:45So tell me more about him then. I know that in the war he was in the Corps of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. What was his job? He did electronics. In the war he was in Egypt at one point. He also drove around Peter Shurm fixing the radar sets and so on with the scleroscope on the back of his motorbike. He was a wonderful guy. He was a little bit absent-minded. Some of the work they had to do in London, some of it was in Manchester. And so there was one time when he was working with the people in Manchester, so he did this sort of commute from London to Manchester and then on the way back, he was with his friends on the train, his colleagues.

14:24He couldn't find his return ticket stub and all of his colleagues had shown the second off the ticket and he couldn't find it anywhere. But they explained he was just absent-minded. You'd never steal from the railways. He wouldn't. They let him through. And then he gets home. And my mother, she says, Conway, where's the car?

14:50I see. That was Dad. I've got it. That was Dad. And what about when your parents met? You know, they met in their mid-50s. How did it happen? Did they tell you? They were the team that worked in this little tin hut on the side of the Franti computer. There was an electronics factory and Franti put in a tin hut on the side of it. They were one of the couples who met and got married. Oh my goodness. How many Franti babies? At least six Franti babies. At least six of you. Well, that's good to know. It's interesting that the birth of the computer age, it sounds quite lo-fi. the way that you're describing it.

15:30They were in a tin hut on the side of the factory and it was quite a normal family life that you lived. It's not like, you know, the digital innovators, the computer innovators of today, where it's people living in gated communities in Silicon Valley. It was a very, a much more ordinary kind of life by the sounds of it. Yeah, I think ordinary with all the positive meanings of the word ordinary. Yes, it was a great life. Your parents were friends with Alan Turing. Did they ever work with him? No, they were colleagues in that same set of people. They weren't in the same lab. What did they tell you about him?

16:04Most of what I heard about was the unfortunate circumstances around his rejection. The end of his life. Yeah. And of course, in 2016, Tim, you were awarded the Turing Prize, often called the Nobel Prize of Computing. How did your parents mark your achievement? Oh, they loved it. Yeah, they stuck it up on the family fridge, along with all the other achievements of my siblings. all right Tim let's have some more music it's your third choice today what are we going to hear next so we're going to hear Streets of London by Ralph Mattel and what does this track mean to you well of all of the things which I sort of learned to play myself after my mum gave me a guitar Streets of London sorts of sums them up and it's always been a favourite of course for me Streets of London weren't being destitute Streets of London for me where I went to go and buy transistors to build my computer with.

16:57So that was Tottenham Court Road. So how can you tell me you're lonely And say for you that the sun don't shine Let me take you by the hand And lead you through the streets of London Show you something to make you change your mind

17:30Ralph McTell and Streets of London. So, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, you grew up in London and, as you mentioned, would head up to Tottenham Court Road to buy the things that you needed to build electronics. So that was a lifelong fascination for you. Yeah, well, I suppose it started off with when you're in primary school, building things with relays. Just in case listeners don't know, what is a relay exactly? Okay, so a relay is the most simple electronic device you can imagine. It's either on or off, and a relay is made from, it has an electromagnet. So when you put power onto the electromagnet, the electromagnet operates the switch.

18:09So there's a little switch and a little electromagnet connected together. So when you put power onto the electromagnet, the switch switches. It can switch on or switch off or both. And so it's a way of building logic circuits. OK. It's the most simplest thing. As you get older, then you want to do more and more complicated things. So transistors are more effective than re-days. And then you can build more and more complicated things like an intercom or for the house and so on. And you did that. You built an intercom for your family home. How did it work? Basically, I got some old telephones and put some power on them and collected them and strung a wire from the top of the house to the bottom of the house.

18:49Did the family use it? Yes. So you started off with relays and then, you know, you went on to create things like this intercom in the house. What else did you build? Well, I had to build a computer. There's a sort of TV shop down in Barnes where I went down to find whether the guy had any old TVs where the screen part would work but the rest of it didn't. He had a whole stack of them, so I took two home. In fact, I put one I had up in my bedroom and the other one I had on the whole table. I had them connected together, so whatever signal I could produce, whatever pattern I could produce on the TV, they could see it on the whole table too.

19:29Oh, wow. They could see my progress. Oh, my goodness. So you had that idea of connectivity right from the beginning? Yes. So you were already thinking about that. And your parents must have obviously encouraged this and allowed it because they must have been quite unwieldy things that you were building, these big old TV screens, quite thick and heavy in those days, I'm guessing? They were, well, TVs, yeah. They were these big boxes. So did your parents encourage you to pursue this interest? Yeah. And of course they'd done a bit of electronics. Mum had worked at Malvern in the lab there and Dad had worked on radar during the war so they'd both done electronics so they could understand and appreciate what I was doing.

20:07How wonderful. Did they ever make any suggestions about what you were building? I did get one suggestion once. I was running through the kitchen with my soldering iron and mum stopped me and she said wait a moment, don't you go around using your soldering iron this cable was put together so badly ok, let me show you how to do that and I never knew that she knew anything about this sort of stuff she stopped me and said ok, let's cut the wire like this twist it around so that the wires don't touch each other tape around each wire now let's put a little flour on it so it isn't sticky ok, that's the way to do it and I said mum, how did it?

20:42And she said, well, you know, in the war, we used a lot of solder guards. How fantastic. You must have just thought she could do anything, young mum. And in terms of where you were getting the information that you needed, to what extent were you just experimenting and making things up? And to what extent were you able to access guides, you know, by pamphlets about how to build your own computer at home? Did you just have to make it up? As the level of building of things gets from individual transistors to integrated circuits, these little chips that you buy in Topham Court Road, those always had manuals.

21:16So each chip you bought would have a data sheet about it. And after a while you'd get to know what they were. So you could imagine, as you'd solder them in, draw diagrams, like a kind of Lego in a way. Each chip had a very different function inside, but there were always manuals about that. Tim, after school you went to study physics at Oxford, So there was no computer science degree available back then in the mid-70s. How much did you enjoy your time at university? Oh, I loved it. Did you? Totally. What did you love about it? Independence, I suppose. Being able to chat to whoever and about anything.

21:54Just the freedom of being away from home and going punting along the Oxford rivers. And tell me about being born in 1955, because you are not the only tech titan to be born in that lucky year. There's you, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. I wonder what it was about your micro generation that made you very well placed to be part of the birth of this new digital age. I think it was the fact that everything got invented at the right time. So when we were in school, in high school, then the transistor got invented. When we were in university, the processor chip got invented. But we could understand about relays when we were in kindergarten.

22:33So my cohort was really lucky. the world invented what it needed as it were just in time and they were also, it was quite accessible wasn't it the components and your ability to do it you know you describe you as a kid running around with a soldering iron there's something very and spending pocket money going down Topical Road spending pocket money it's time for some more music we're going to have your fourth choice if you wouldn't mind Sir Tim Berners-Lee, what's next? fourth one is Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie another folk song another folk song This one from America, this one very much sort of core of the whole being a more processed culture.

23:12It's a wonderful song, it's funny, it's long. You can spend your time trying to learn all the words. You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant Walk right in, it's around the back Just a half a mile from the railroad track And you can get anything you want At Alice's Restaurant Now it all started two Thanksgivings ago Two years ago on... Arlo Guthrie and Alice's Restaurant. It is a long track, that, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and I'm told that you can sing the whole thing. Who told her that? Your wife, Rosemary. You know every word, is that true?

24:01I did once. You were doing pretty well there, singing along, I have to say. So listen, tell me what happened after graduation. You worked in electronics in the UK, but then you went on to CERN in Geneva for the first time in 1980. What kind of environment was that to be in? Wonderful. People come from all over the world to put together this big underground accelerator, 27km. So you've got people collaborating from all over the world, speaking different languages, using different sorts of computer as well. So a very heterogeneous environment. So when I arrived, there was a feeling of that. It was really hard to keep track of what was going on.

24:46In fact, the crucial thing was the coffee space. There was a coffee counter at the intersection of four different corridors. You'd pull people out of the flow of the traffic between the offices, is give them a coffee, which, of course, for somebody from England, actually to have a decent European coffee was already pretty good. But then maybe even a croissant. But then once you've got this person, this was the way you found out what was going on. Right, OK. Buy somebody a coffee, talk to them about the bit they designed worked, how you can work with that. So obviously, you know, the kind of environment that gets you thinking and, you know, it was really fertile ground for your creative imagination.