Where did it all go wrong?
A nostalgic excursion into the history of the British computer industry triggered by some comments on Twitter, made up from a book review I wrote in 2012 and a couple of blog posts (here and here) that followed.
It is 1975, and at the Park Senior High School (as bog standard a comprehensive as they came) a group of curious schoolboys led by a farsighted maths teacher (Pete Bayley, who subsequently went on to become the Director of Qualifications at the British Computer Society) take the bus into Swindon town centre and enter the headquarters of the Nationwide Building Society. There, we potter down to the computer room where we are allowed access to their mainframe (a UNIVAC 1109 with drum storage, if my memory serves) because they didn’t use it in the evening. I will never forget that kindness from Nationwide and they still have place in my heart for it today. It was there we worked on our first serious programming project, a system to schedule appointments for the parent’s evenings!
Can you imagine ringing up, say, Barclays Bank today and asking them if some school kids could use their mainframe in the evening if they’re not too busy? Astonishing. As Pete wrote many years later:
This same keen group were the ones that went with me to the offices of the Nationwide Building Society for several years to run, on the UNIVAC machine at their new offices in Swindon, a COBOL program (sorry app) to match staff and parents up for parents evening meetings. I doubt that I could get through today’s security there to ‘play with their line printers’ as we did then.
Having a whole computer to yourself was then a novelty. When Brian Dyer, the then-deputy headmaster of Park asked me and a few friends if we’d be interested in sitting a Certificate of Secondary Education (CSE) in Computer Studies (the school had no lessons in the subject, so we had to just read up in our spare time) my first contact with a general-purpose stored-value computer system came via punched cards sent to Bristol Polytechnic once each week. You punched your cards, they were sent off and a week later you got back your print out. I think it was an ICL 1902A, the first IC-based range they produced (the A meant it had a floating point unit for scientific calculations), and we wrote in FORTRAN.
The school also got a teletype, and we had access to a GEISCO time-sharing system using Dartmouth BASIC. I think we were allowed an hour per week, or something like that. I got a CSE Grade 1, and was set for life…
Other weeks we took the bus up to the now-demolished Swindon College, where we used their Elliott 803B with a then-amazing 8Kb of core memory (you tell the kids of today that…) to write Algol programmes on 5-track paper tape. You loaded the compiler, the loaded your program and the machine produced a machine code tape (for their strange 39-bit word instruction set) and then loaded your machine code and executed. Here’s a video of someone using one of these beasts!
I don’t remember much about what software we wrote, although I do remember spending an inordinate amount of time working on my football simulation that used random numbers to work out where the ball went after each kick.
In the hot summer of 1976, we were also allowed, and I have no memory of how this came about, to cycle out to the Royal Military College of Science in Shrivenham and use their more advanced computer system — although I can’t remember what this was — to write in Algol 68-R. In those pre-Al Qaeda days, we were allowed to amble around the campus and wander in and out of the computer room essentially unfettered. This all stood me in good stead. When I got my first vacation job at college it was for the Southern Water Authority in Eastleigh. One day my boss asked me if I could help him with a problem. The IT department (in Brighton) were sending him the wrong statistics. Did I know anything about computers? We opened the cupboard at the end of the corridor and found a teletype connected to a 1900-series (a 1906?) running Fortran under GEORGE III, which fortunately I knew how to use. I was instantly appointed departmental IT supremo, and never looked back!
But wait. Let’s go back to Nationwide for a moment. Why was one of our largest financial institutions using this American system? After the invention of the general-purpose computer during the Second World War, Britain led the world in the technology. I’ve already mentioned the ground-breaking Elliott from 1963. Yet by the time I was in high school, America dominated. What happened?
The universal automatic computer (Univac) series in use by Nationwide had been developed by US entrepreneurial pioneers the Ecket-Mauchly Computer Corporation, which ended up part of Sperry Rand. Why weren’t they using an EMI computer? If you want to know why, you should pick up Tony Gandy’s “The Early Computer Industry”, which is a terrific study of the post-war, nascent computer industry’s evolution. And if you’re wondering what happened to Britain’s EMI and its early lead in the computer industry, I refer you to my favourite quote in Tony’s book:
Although this was the fastest printer in the UK, its reliance on bicycle chains was a source of some concern to EMI engineers.
OK, so maybe not EMI then. But why not English Electric (EE)? Or Elliott? Or ICT? Or why not Ferranti? The world’s first stored program general-purpose computer was the Mark I developed at Manchester University in 1948. Manchester was the home town of the electronics giant, who went on to win the word’s first export order for a mainframe computer when they sold a version of the Mark I to the University of Toronto.
Britain led the world in the graphene of the post-war world. Indeed, in 1963 it had a trade surplus of half a million quid in computer technology. Two decades later, it had a trade deficit one hundred times greater. How did this happen? Why did the computer industries in the US and the UK develop so differently?
The truth is that by 1963 it was already too late. The structural differences were already manifest. The US was developing computer companies, whereas in the UK computers were sidelines for electronics companies. IBM had already defeated the electronics companies who had pioneered the technology. When it came down to it, what IBM had that they did not was experience of commercial sales of equipment. By the end of the evolution of “first generation” computer technology, everyone else was already a rounding error compared to IBM. As Tony makes clear, not everything IBM did was a success. Big Blue didn’t have a crystal ball, but it did have a relationship with commercial customers through a sales force that was able to sell them computers.
For a truly English take on all this, by the way, look no further than Gillian Ferry’s “A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Tea Shops and the world s first office computer” which tells the story how the Lyons Electronic Office (LEO) computer was developed by a restaurant chain and went live in January 1954 processing their payroll. It was then subsequently developed by English Electric after it was acquired in 1964. In 1965 they called in McKinsey, who recommended a reorganisation, and went on to launch the System/4. They sold/10 of them and English Electric vanished three years later after being merged into ICL in 1968.
When I originally reviewed Tony’s book for Financial World magazine back in 2013, I said that the book’s subtitle should have been “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” rather than “Limitations of scale and scope”, because the story it tells is of how British state support of the nascent industry doomed it. Tony concludes that the US government’s strategy of purchasing large numbers of computers seems to have been a much more effective route to support than the British government’s policy of directly supporting development in the wrong firms the wrong time. We had a Ministry of Technology (led from 1966 to 1970 by the noted technologist Anthony Wedgwood-Benn) that directed the formation of our national champion ICL, a champion that inherited a legacy which meant it could never develop a successful strategy despite having one of the ranges that IBM actually saw as a serious competitor, which was that old 1900 series machine that I used in my very first paid programming job.
*wipes away tear*
If you want to post your memories of the Elliott below, I’d love to see them!
