The 10 Cultures Problem

It’s fifty years since CP Snow gave his famous lecture on The Two Cultures at the Senate House in Cambridge. Tomorrow I make my contribution to the University’s 800th anniversary celebration with a lecture on ‘The 10 Cultures Problem’ at the Computer Laboratory.

And it’s featured on the University home page. No pressure then…

University of Cambridge home page
University of Cambridge home page

Getting Under the Bonnet

[As ever, this is also on the BBC News website, though note that I *don’t* think we should be a nation of programmers – the question mark is there for a reason!]

I’ve had my own website for fifteen years now, running on a wide variety of different computers. I started off with some space on the PIPEX WorldServer, a large – for the time – system that offered web hosting back in the days when getting online was a dark art and I was lucky enough to work for one of the early commercial internet service providers.

On leaving PIPEX I moved over to Cityscape, another Cambridge-based provider from the early days. When they [update: as Simon notes in the comments, they didn’t go bust but were sold, but they did stop hosting stuff for people like me…] went out of business I set up a server at home for a while before relocating the hardware to a shelf in the corner of a friend’s office, where he was happy to offer bandwidth and a power supply for a very modest monthly payment.

Three years ago I moved the whole thing again, this time onto a virtual server at Bytemark, one of the many small hosting companies that offer friendly and reliable server space for all sorts of organisations.

Continue reading “Getting Under the Bonnet”