Ian Cleland Ritchie, is a Scottish businessman specialising in the

information technology Information technology (IT) is the use of computers to create, process, store, retrieve, and exchange all kinds of data . and information. IT forms part of information and communications technology (ICT). An information technology system (I ...

sector. In 1984, Ritchie founded the

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

company, Office Workstations Limited (OWL) in

Edinburgh Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian ...

, after leaving ICL when they closed their Scottish Development Centre at

Dalkeith Palace Dalkeith Palace is a country house in Dalkeith, Midlothian, Scotland. It was the seat of the Dukes of Buccleuch from 1642 until 1914, and is owned by the Buccleuch Living Heritage Trust. The present palace was built 1701–1711 on the site of the ...

the previous year. In late 1990, Ritchie met

Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profess ...

at a computer fair in Paris. It was there that Berners-Lee told him about a system he and his team at

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gene ...

were developing, which with the aid of computer terminals, would enable its staff to view and edit the vast amounts of information the facility was generating and storing in hypertext documents. He said the system could be scaled up for use worldwide, and would enable users of computers connected to the Internet to access, edit and share documents in the same way too – he called this new system the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

. Thinking this sounded a bit pretentious, not to mention a mouthful to pronounce, Ritchie convinced himself it would not come to much and duly rejected the idea as a viable business proposition. From that day on,

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

and

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...

remained free and non-proprietary. Over the next few years, the number of web sites online grew from 1 in 1991, to over 1 billion by 2014. From its humble beginnings, the web grew into the enormous global communications and commercial system it is today. From 1997 onwards, Ritchie became involved in

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

and was the founding chairman of several Scottish IT companies, including Voxar, VIS Entertainment, Orbital Software Group, and Digital Bridges. He has also been on the board of

Scottish Enterprise Scottish Enterprise is a non-departmental public body of the Scottish Government which encourages economic development, enterprise, innovation and investment in business. The body covers the eastern and central parts of Scotland whilst similar ...

, the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council, and

Channel Four Television Corporation Channel Four Television Corporation is a British state-owned media company headquartered in London. Its original and principal activity is the British national television network Channel 4. The company was founded in 1982 as the Channel Four T ...

. He was a founding director and chairman of the Scottish Software Federation from 1988 to 1990, and served as president of the

British Computer Society Sir Maurice Wilkes served as the first President of BCS in 1957 BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, known as the British Computer Society until 2009, is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in infor ...

from 1998 to 1999. In the New Year Honours 2003, Ritchie was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) ''for services to enterprise and education''. Ritchie also holds honorary doctorates from four Scottish universities. As of 2019, he is the non-executive chairman of Tern plc, Computer Applications Service, and Krotos; he is a board director of Shotscope Ltd, and was chairman of iomart Group plc from 2008 to 2018. He serves on the board of the National Theatre of Scotland, and the Scottish Council for Development and Industry (SCDI). Between 2012 and 2016 he was vice-president for business of

The Royal Society of Edinburgh The Royal Society of Edinburgh is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity that operates on a wholly independent and non-partisan basis and provides public benefit throughout Scotland. It was established i ...

, having become a Fellow in 2002, and also honorary treasurer of the Royal Academy of Engineering, having become a Fellow in 2001. His writes a column in ''Scottish Business Insider'' magazine, and his TED talk has been viewed over 600,000 times. Ritchie was inducted into the

Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame The Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame honours "those engineers from, or closely associated with, Scotland who have achieved, or deserve to achieve, greatness", as selected by an independent panel representing Scottish engineering institutions, aca ...

in 2022.

References

External links

Coppertop - Ian Ritchie's website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ritchie, Ian Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Scottish businesspeople Commanders of the Order of the British Empire Fellows of the British Computer Society Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering International Computers Limited people Alumni of Heriot-Watt University Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame inductees