“I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965.”
The Story
The University of Oxford's contributions to computing are theoretical in origin and catastrophic in consequence. Tony Hoare, who held Oxford's chair in computing for over two decades, invented Quicksort (1960), developed Hoare logic for proving program correctness, created Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) — the formal model that influenced Go's goroutines and Erlang's actor model — and, most famously, invented the null reference in 1965 while designing ALGOL W. He later called it his "billion-dollar mistake," estimating the cumulative cost of null pointer exceptions across all software.
Tim Berners-Lee studied physics at Oxford's Queen's College before going to CERN, where he invented the World Wide Web. The web's design — hypertext over HTTP, identified by URLs, rendered by browsers — created the execution context for half the exhibits in this museum. XSS, CSRF, SQL injection via web forms, session hijacking — all are patterns that exist because the web exists, and the web exists because a physicist from Oxford needed a way to share documents.
Why They're in the Hall
Oxford is in the museum because it produced both the theoretical tools for preventing software failure (Hoare logic, CSP, formal verification) and the practical decisions that caused it (null references, the web as an attack surface). Hoare proved you could formally verify program correctness. The industry chose not to, because formal verification is expensive and Katie's Law selects for the cheaper path. Oxford gave the industry the cure and the disease.