Ian Ritchie (entrepreneur)

Ian Cleland Ritchie , CBE FREng FRSE FBCS CEng is a Scottish executives specialising in the Information Technology sector.

In 1984, Ritchie founded the software company, Office Workstations Limited (OWL) in Edinburgh , after leaving ICL als ze hun closed Scottish Development Centre at Dalkeith Palace the previous year.

In late 1990, Ritchie with Tim Berners-Lee at a computer fair in Paris. It was there dat Berners-Lee Told im about a system he and his team at CERN ulcers ontwikkelingslanden In this housing with the aid of computer terminals, mention anything enable zijn staff to view and edit the fixed Bedragen or information the facility was generating and storing in hypertext documents. He zegt the system Could be scaled up for use worldwide, and mention anything enable users or computers connected to the Internet to access, edit and share documents in the composition way too – he called this new system the World Wide Web . Thinking this sounded a bit pretentious, not to mention a mouthful to pronouncing Ritchie convinced himself it mention anything not come to much and duly rejected the idea as a viable business proposition. ^[1] From dat day on HTML and HTTP remained free and non-proprietary. Over the next few years, the number of web sites online Grew from 1 ^[2] in 1991 to over 1 billion in 2014. From humble beginnings zijn, the web Grew into tje enormous global communications and commercial system it is today.

From 1997 onwards, Ritchie became involved in venture capital and was the founding chairman of verschillende Scottish IT companies, zoals Voxar, VIS Entertainment, Orbital Software Group, and Digital Bridges. He has ook leg on the board of Scottish Enterprise , the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council , and Channel Four Television Corporation .

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 from 1998 to 1999.

In the New Year Honours in 2003 , Ritchie was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to enterprise and education . ^[3] Ritchie ook holds Honorary Doctorates from four Scottish universities.

As of 2008, Ritchie is Chairman of Computer Application Services, Blipfoto Limited, Scapa Technologies and Caspian Learning and a Director of iomart Group plc . Outside of the business world, he was Vice President for Business of the Royal Society of Edinburgh , ^[4] an Honorary Professor of Heriot-Watt University , ^[5] a board member of the Edinburgh International Science Festival , a trustee of the National Museums of Scotland , a member of the board of Our Dynamic Earth , and a trustee of the Bletchley Park Trust.

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