During his time at Oxford, microprocessors became commercially available, prompting the author and his friends to create and attempt to sell their own boards. However, they did not achieve the level of success that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs did. This lack of success can be attributed to the absence of a vibrant community and cultural environment like that found in Silicon Valley and the Homebrew Computer Club, which fostered innovation.

According to Berners-Lee, the right conditions for innovation, described as a "primordial soup," were critical for technological advancement. The creative atmosphere that thrived in the Bay Area during the 1970s simply did not exist in Oxfordshire at that time, which limited the potential for groundbreaking developments in the computing field.