Goodbye to something that didn’t exist … Location 23

A few years ago, BT invited me to give a keynote talk at one of their research open-day conferences. The location? Well, it was a secret place that no one should know that it exists … the BT Tower in London. After my talk, I was invited to take the lift to the top floor and was shown the whole of London’s landscape. Coming from Edinburgh, it always amazes me how flat London is, but it gives amazing views of all the famous landmarks. “And, do you know, Bill, that we are actually moving?”, “Are we?”, “Yes, fix on a building, and watch it”. And, yes, we were moving. It was fantastic.

Cryptography, The Internet and Telecommunications

There are three great things that I love in the history of technology. The first is the creation of public key encryption and with all the advances of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. It is a story of Diffie and Hellman; Rivest, Shamir and Adleman; Merkle; and so many others. And, the story of the creation of the Web is another, with the creation of Ethernet, routers, HTTP and all the other protocols and methods that created this amazing technological advancement. But, the third thing is the rise of telecommunications, and where we moved from a voice network that struggled to support 64 kbps to now supporting many gigabits per second.