I was watching a British show from the late 1960s, and there were a couple episodes where computers came in to play. And I started thinking about just how much they’d change and improve in the next decade (in particular a certain plot twist that wouldn’t work even a few years later made me think of it). And I started thinking of the characters that were developing those computers and wondering about computer engineers in Britain in the 1970s (their futures) - was Cambridge the place to go for the highly skilled to be highly paid and highly challenged? Were there other competing locales?
We think a lot about software now, but I was really thinking hardware for this time period.
For hardware, you’d want Manchester, with your time period mostly covering the MU5:
The Manchester computers were an innovative series of stored-programelectronic computers developed during the 30-year period between 1947 and 1977 by a small team at the University of Manchester, under the leadership of Tom Kilburn.[1] They included the world’s first stored-program computer, the world’s first transistorised computer, and what was the world’s fastest computer at the time of its inauguration in 1962.[2][3][4][5]
The collaboration with Ferranti eventually led to an industrial partnership with the computer company ICL, who made use of many of the ideas developed at the university, particularly in the design of their 2900 series of computers during the 1970s.[8][9][10]
I was going to suggest this. I went to University in Manchester and the joke told at the expense of the other university in Manchester (the technical university UMIST) was that University of Manchester invented the computer and atom (Alan Turing, Rutherford and Bohr all did work there) and UMIST invented Vimto (a soft drink invented as part of temperance movement)
There is also the Thames Valley. The commuter towns along the M4 motorway west of London, like Reading, Maidenhead, Slough, and Bracknell. When I grew up there and graduated from university in the 1980s and 90s it was considered Britain’s answer to Silicon Valley and all the big tech companies had HQs there, don’t know what it was like in the 70s.
Plus of course even more than nowadays the primary user of computers was the government, particularly the military and intelligence services. So a computer user in the 1970s would likely have worked somewhere like GCHQ in Cheltenham (the equivalent of the NSA, who unbenkwonst to anyone except the high levels of the British government were continuing the work of Bletchley Park, and who invent RSA encryption long before RSA did), the army research HQ at Fort Halstead in Kent, and the nuclear weapons research institute at Aldermaston (and the associated nuclear power research institute in Harwell, south of Oxford). Both of these last ones are close to the Thames Valley and may have influenced the tech industry there? (I grew up right next to Harwell, and there is still a big private research park there, though the Harwell itself shut down in the 1990s)
My wife briefly lived in Cheltenham, and reports that when you started meeting people and got invited to parties and like social events the range of people you’d meet was: farmer, farmer, small business owner, farmer, small business owner, incredibly bright mathematician, farmer, farmer…
The mathematicians were the ones you wanted to talk to because they were a more diverse group and they would under no circumstances talk about their work.
I hope this is a good time to plug one of my favorite Youtube chans, Asianometry. He has videos about a lot of interesting stuff but here’s one about the early computing business in the UK:
Not the 70’s, but I did work in the computer industry in the Cambridge area in the very early 80’s.
I wrote a lot of the 6809 code for the ill-fated H H Tiger (ill-fated because of course the IBM PC came out shortly afterwards and steamrollered all previous personal computers into oblivion)!
I was rather focused on my work, but I was sort of aware that there were quite a few other computer startups in the area…?
I used to work for a security software company and GCHQ was one our customers. When they would ring tech support they say “This is Dave from Cheltenham”, they’d never actually say “GCHQ”.
The tech humour writer Verity Stobbs would refer to the UK tech corridor as “Basingbrack” to include the M3 and M4 corridors between Basingstoke and Bracknell.
