Conway Berners-Lee
| Conway Berners-Lee | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
10 September 1921 Birmingham, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Trinity College, Cambridge |
| Employer | NPL ICI, Ferranti, ICT, ICL |
| Spouse(s) | Mary Lee Woods |
| Children | Tim Berners-Lee, Peter, Helen, Michael |
| Parent(s) | Helen Lane Campbell Gray and Cecil Burford Berners-Lee |
Conway Berners-Lee (born 10 September 1921) is an English mathematician and computer scientist who worked in the team that developed the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercial stored program electronic computer. He was born in Birmingham in 1921 and is the father of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web.
Early in World War II Berners-Lee volunteered for the armed services, but was re-directed to university because the government needed people trained in mathematics and electronics. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge in 1940 and read parts I and II of the mathematical tripos as a compressed two-year course. In addition, he attended a series of lectures in electronics. After university he had further training in electronic engineering and soon joined the army in the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME). He worked on Gun Laying and Searchlight Radar in England.
After the end of hostilities, Berners-Lee was posted to Egypt where he encountered Maurice Kendall's book The Advanced Theory of Statistics which greatly impressed him. He then had a chance to join the statistics bureau in the GHQ in Cairo, known as the Number 1 Statistics Unit of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. He was employed to close down a very large punched card installation involving about five million 65-column punched cards covering all types of vehicle and spares. This meant that they had to say goodbye to 30 women who had been punching the cards. The last job was sorting and listing the 250,000 personnel cards to get all the service people onto ships for home. There was a race with the clerks doing this job by hand—and the clerks won over the machines.
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