Timothy Berners-Lee, the Inventor of the World Wide Web, visited the Department of Computer Science at the University of Essex on 26th March 1998 on the occasion of the conferment of an Honorary Doctorate of the University. He met with Prof Vic Callaghan founder, and at the time, head of Robotics at Essex, who told him about the groups work on extending the Internet to encompass embedded networked devices that went on to develop into Intelligent Environments and Internet-of-Things research.
Top Left: Vic Callaghan welcomes Dr Timothy Berners-Lee (and his parents) to the department and poses for a photo. In the pictures from left to right are Timothy Berners-Lee’s parents, Timothy Berners-Lee, Vic Callaghan.
Bottom Left and Top Right: Vic Callaghan explaining a vision for extending the Internet and World-Wide-Web to embrace networked embedded computing devices that later became the Internet-of-Things and Intelligent Environments.
Bottom Right: Timothy Berners-Lee being given a demonstration of two prototype “Internet-of-Things” devices. The first was an internet controlled robot and the second was an networked embedded-computer system called superVisor that enabled the internet to be connected to sensors, cameras and actuators. Essex university attempted to commercialise this via a spin-off company called netCam but found that the market at that time was not ready for Internet connected cameras, sensors and actuators which are not commonplace. In this picture from left to right are Vic Callaghan, Tim burners-Lee’s mother, Tim Berners-Lee, John Powers and Paul Chernett.