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Now I know what it takes to make me properly speechless: it is being introduced to a room full of British computing entrepreneurs, in a university college founded in 1448, before listening to a speech from a Professor of Computer Science, born in 1913.

The professor is Maurice Wilkes (pictured, see his Wikipedia entry here), the college was Queens', and the room with the Harry Potter decor and ambience was the Old Hall.

The occasion, and the audience, though, is what I want to draw your attention to - but first, let's have a rapid tour of the man who they came to honour, and who chose to accept that honour from that specific group.

Maurice Wilkes built EDSAC; you can read that story in any number of websites (but oddly, not in any books on Amazon - putting in EDSAC brings up a Delia Smith cookbook), and it's fair to say that this is one of the first half-dozen or so computers anywhere that deserve the term.

It is not to skip over that achievement to leave the description there. I could turn this article into a nicely filled, lovingly detailed (and these days, almost completely irrelevant) essay in what EDSAC did, and how much faster your mobile phone is these days, but that would be to greatly misrepresent the whole atmosphere and outlook. Not just of Wilkes and his endearing little speech: but also of the other 100-odd technologists assembled in the room.

Computing's elder statesman

Wilkes is 94. He had taught a reasonable number of the diners in earlier years, and from the perspective of nearly a century thinking about the fundamental nature of computing, he wanted to share a few ideas. You will no doubt be relieved to hear, as I was, that he considers computing to have "turned out quite well", based on principles which he started to evaluate back in the 1930s, under the tutelage of a mentor who, he remembered, was already looking at the general concept of things being computable, while equipped with nothing faster than undergraduates with sprung-wound, oil-lubricated desk calculators.

He also appraised Cambridge as an institution, and drew everyone's attention to the early identification of large scale change and how Cambridge had quite happily been doing that for an extended timespan (say, ten generations as measured in Wilkes lifespans thus far). Middle-aged organisations, he observed, seemed to be more unsettled by the forces of change.

You might expect, if you took an industry view of Wilkes and his career (research; RADAR development in the war; commercial spells inside the now vanished monolith of Digital Equipment Corporation; academic longevity inside the Computer Lab at Cambridge) that he would be full of rollicking ancdotes of hot pools of solder inside EDSAC, or running around with the clamp for extracting blown valves in mid-compute, now on display in the William Gates building<

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. But in what might be his last speech he compressed all that down into one statement: "if you know what it is you want to achieve, then it helps if you know how to do it."

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