As usual I’m a little behind with watching some of the videos I’m subscribed to. However, this afternoon I got round to watching the ScobleShow video tour of CERN near Geneva.

CERN is very much science on a big scale, with the new accelerator the Large Hadron Collider running for 27km under the mountains. Not surprisingly, to support all of this research, they’ve needed a similar level of computing resources. The two people doing most of the talking on the video are Ben Segal and Jean-François Groff, who were both involved in key parts of the story of the birth of the World Wide Web along with Tim Berners-Lee. Ben Segal was key in introducing TCP/IP into the organisation, and at one point in the video talks about the significant internal arguments that took place over using the North American protocol over European alternatives. Jean-François Groff worked with Tim Berners-Lee on the first browser and the underlying protocol.

Alongside the history, you also get a bit of background as to the main work at CERN looking around the on site museum. The video then finishes with a look at the data centre, with a discussion of quite how much the contents of the data centre have changed. Definitely an interesting video.