Comment: My mind-blowing evening with £2.5bn worth of British computing talent

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Posted on 3 Apr 2008 at 08:43

This sounds like the last word in dry humour, but it struck a chord for his audience, and it's them I think you should be paying attention to.

The Cambridge Ring

Collectively, that room of 100-odd members (thickly sprinkled on this occasion with press, and award winners awaiting their plaques) makes up The Cambridge Ring. Don't go looking on Wikipedia for this, because you will find either the precursor to Token Ring network topologies, or various overheated sites detailing the spin-off accusations relating to Kim Philby and other alleged spies.

In this case The Cambridge Ring is the association of alumni of the computer lab.

I know: ho hum, you say, friendsreunited.com with all the women taken off, and at one level you wouldn't be far wrong: but consider this. They are a self-effacing lot, with a sharply theoretical bent to the way they look at the developments in, and business of, computing.

There's always a proper academic lecture at the start of the meeting, and on this occasion it was a young chap who had been thinking about the problems of allowing machines to work with chunks of memory, once 80-core CPUs become the norm. He didn't think it was very far off: one of the awards handed out at this annual dinner went to a team of two guys who have been taking the very largest possible scale view of phishing attempts - those stupid emails that try to gather up your online banking username and password.

They took great care to talk about their methodology, as did the (only) young lady there, who wanted to apply methods developed in Ethnographic studies, to how teams operate in modern corporations over computer networks.

No dancing paperclips

It's almost as if there's no honour in commercialisation - this isn't the "better network browser" academic association, any more than Wilkes in 1936 was striving to make a desk calculator with lower internal friction between its gears. These guys are looking for underlying, driving principles, and ignoring the distractions: no dancing paperclips for them.

Which may go to explain why the best estimate for the total net worth of that cramped room, with their awkward but quickfire sense of humour and strangely conformist brand of English madness, tops £2.5 billion - the last £500 million being accounted for in just one man and just one deal, because Citrix just bought XenSource to boost its game in the server virtualisation marketplace.

These guys may murmur shyly about their collective impact, and prefer to meet inside the safe haven of their colleges between terms, but make no mistake: that room of people is the seed engine of Britain's computational future.

There is something about that institution: the approach, the openness, the sense of mutual respect, the humour - which has been turning out those kind of people since before even Maurice Wilkes arrived there.

Dizzy from the whole experience, I can't shake the idea that all of us live and work in the world that Wilkes, and his successors in that room, have created, and are continuing to create.

Click here for more on the Cambridge Computer Laboratory

Author: Steve Cassidy