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In its lifetime, the Olivetti Research Lab (ORL) sponsored dozens of Cambridge computing students, and published more than 100 technical papers in partnership with members of the University. Any innovations that might prove worthy of commercial exploitation, particularly those which disrupted established technologies, were given a customised business model to help them to flourish.
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Carrying out projects on behalf of the Italian PC manufacturer, but free to select its own priorities, it was essentially a bridge between academia and industry.
In 1986, the enterprise culture that Harter had perceived in and around the University’s Computer Lab was significantly enriched by the establishment of a Cambridge Research Lab owned by Olivetti. Hopper, who is now Director of the Computer Lab, would later become his PhD supervisor and a co-founder of RealVNC. That was where I wanted to end up working.” In his first summer, he got a job at Acorn under the stewardship of Hermann Hauser and Andy Hopper, both pioneering figures in the cluster’s history. “I wanted to come to Cambridge, because, even though it was the early days of Silicon Fen, I knew that there was an industry based around the Computer Laboratory.
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“It took me about two seconds to choose maths.” A self-confessed computing nut who had taught himself how to build and program computers while still at school, he had his sights firmly set on further study in that field. “It was one of those crossroads in life, music or maths,” he reflects. Harter himself went to Cambridge in 1980, and would have been an organ scholar, only back then Colleges required organists to take music as a degree. Today, RealVNC still has many informal links with the University of Cambridge, and it is clear that without it – and in particular without its Computer Laboratory – the business would never have existed. This makes RealVNC one of the most successful companies in Cambridge’s technology cluster (the so-called “Silicon Fen”), and one of the biggest success stories among tech spin-outs with origins at the University. This month, the company was also honoured with the MacRobert Award – the UK’s premier award for innovation in engineering. To win three is unusual – but holding three at once (each expires after five years) is rare indeed. These awards are the most prestigious accolades for business in the UK. “At our best guess, it is being used in more than a billion devices.” Harter says.Įarlier this year, RealVNC won its third Queen’s Award for Enterprise in as many years. Invented for a purpose far more specific than the array of functions it now fulfils (“let your desktop follow you around” was an early proto-slogan), VNC is now so ubiquitous that it is an official part of the Internet, alongside web and email protocols.
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The software essentially allows a computer screen to be accessed remotely and controlled from another device. The broadband phone might have been ahead of its time, but demand for VNC has been rising since day one. It would be churlish, to say the least, were Harter or anyone else at RealVNC – the company which he co-founded in 2002 to exploit the technology, and of which he is CEO – to look back on such abortive opportunities with regret. In fact, the phone was just one of a wide range of possible uses that were being mooted around that time for his Virtual Network Computing (VNC) system. Plans for the broadband phone were reluctantly shelved, but the technology that Harter had hoped might enable users to access programs through their mobile was already starting to flourish. “but the concepts we mapped out have undoubtedly lived on.” “There is a saying in the investment community that being too early is a good as being wrong,” Harter says.
Expense was a problem, wireless broadband was not commonplace, and there were some technical obstacles to resolve. Mobile companies, not to mention their customers, simply weren’t ready for the type of phone that was being proposed. Seven or eight years before Apple unveiled the iPhone, not everyone really got the point of this idea. I’m pretty certain that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were there.” The room was packed with technology luminaries and CEOs. “Around 2000, we demonstrated it at the famous Sun Valley summer camp for industry moguls. “We knew that the phones of the future would need to do a lot more than just make calls,” Andy Harter, responsible for the broadband phone project, remembers. This, though, was 1999 – and the place was not an Apple research lab, but Cambridge, UK.
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