Today, it’s hard to imagine a world without digital documents, cloud storage or email.
But there was a time when suggesting computers could transform the way people worked sounded unrealistic – if not completely absurd.
When Henning Kirkegaard told his classmates that one day computers could do the work of thousands of people, they looked at him as if he were crazy.
“I remember telling my classmates that if you programmed these machines properly, they could do the work of a thousand people. They looked at me like I was crazy.”
– Henning Kirkegaard, CEO hos WebLager®
Looking back, it’s easy to see he was right. At the time, almost nobody believed him. This is the story of how that belief became WebLager®.
Growing up far from technology
Henning’s story began a long way from computers. He grew up in a poor fishing community near Harboøre, where most people became fishermen or unskilled labourers. No one in his family had attended university. As a child, he noticed something that stayed with him: the people who had the freedom to choose their future all had one thing in common.
They had an education. Henning broke the cycle. After training as a blacksmith, he continued his studies, first in engineering in Aarhus and later earning a Master’s degree from the Technical University of Denmark. Without knowing it, he was preparing for a technological revolution that had barely begun.
Seeing what others didn’t
While computers slowly appeared around the university, most people barely paid attention to them. Henning couldn’t stop thinking about them. He spent hours learning to program and exploring what these machines might one day become. Where others saw expensive calculators, he saw something entirely different: tools that could fundamentally change how businesses operated. It was a bold idea in the late 1970s. History would eventually prove it wasn’t bold enough.
The fax that changed everything
The moment that turned belief into action came after graduation. Working as an engineer on a power plant project, Henning urgently needed technical drawings from the office. A colleague cycled back, collected them and sent them by fax. Twenty-three blank pages arrived. The drawings had been loaded into the fax machine upside down. It was a frustrating mistake – but also a revealing one. Why should critical information depend on paper, physical transport and fax machines when computers could make it instantly available? To Henning, the answer seemed obvious. At the time, almost nobody else agreed.
Choosing conviction over comfort
Henning proposed creating a department dedicated to digitising documents and making them available online.
Management rejected the idea. The company employed around 17,000 people, yet Henning became only the second employee to receive an email address. Some directors laughed:
“What’s the point of email? There’s nobody to send one to”
Henning simply replied:
“You’ll be seeing a lot more of this.”
He could have stayed. Instead, he chose to leave a secure engineering career and build the future he believed was coming.
That decision became Dansk Scanning – the company now known as WebLager®.
Looking back
Today, digital transformation feels inevitable. But it wasn’t inevitable. Someone had to believe in it first. Long before cloud computing, digital archives and online collaboration became everyday business, Henning Kirkegaard was convinced they would. The rest of WebLager’s story began with that conviction.
In Chapter 2, we’ll explore how that same forward-thinking mindset led WebLager® to invest in renewable energy decades before sustainability became a business standard.
