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2014 Internet Hall of Fame Interviews: Ben Segal

Tim Berners-Lee invent­ed the Web at CERN. He was a young guy at CERN. He kind­ly said I was a men­tor to him, because I was doing this oper­a­tion of intro­duc­ing and teach­ing pro­to­cols. I taught him sock­et pro­gram­ming and that sort of thing. And I noticed him as a young…eager beaver. And I watched the process of him invent­ing the Web, single-handedly. So, that’s the high­light and I would say that was­n’t a result…you know, direct result of what I did, but cer­tain­ly I helped to cre­ate the ground for him, the envi­ron­ment for him, to make that inven­tion at CERN. Because CERN was not a par­tic­u­lar­ly fer­tile place.

Ben Segal’s Internet Hall of Fame 2014 Induction Speech

I want to just make a few remarks about men­tors and pro­tec­tors. Most of us here have need­ed either or both of those. So I want to talk about two peo­ple in par­tic­u­lar with­out whom I would­n’t be here. The first per­son you know, and the sec­ond per­son you almost sure­ly don’t know.