Top 10 UK contributions to IT

Although it’s fair to say that UK companies don’t dominate the tech industry in the same way that American, Japanese and Korean companies do, that’s not to say that our small island nation hasn’t played a big part in creating and shaping the world as we know it.

In fact, a large part of life today wouldn’t be the same if it weren’t for British inventors, designers and entrepreneurs. Our bolt isn’t completely shot, either, as we continue to contribute and evolve the tech world.

While there are a lot of people and companies that have and currently work in the IT industry, this is our list of the ones that we think have made the biggest impact.

10. GEORGE BOOLE (BOOLEAN LOGIC)

All computers use the base-2 binary numeral system, where all component data is composed of individual bits of 0s and 1s. This rather simplistic system allows incredibly complicated applications and algorithms to be created, but underneath it all the engineers and low-level programmers have to understand the logic that controls this.

Step forwards, George Boole who created Boolean logic in the 1840s. This system is defined as a “logical calculus of truth values”. To put it another way, Boolean logic defines statements as either true (1) or false (0). So, a hundred years before the first digital computer, the logic system was created.

Boolean logic is evident in every part of technology. Logic gate diagrams and truth maps are all used to plan circuits, while Boolean expressions are a key part of any programming language. In effect, then, George Boole devised the language of computers, before

100 years before the first computer, George Boole devised the logic system that’s still used today

9. THE FIRST COMPUTER EVER: COLOSSUS

Although Charles Babbage designed the first computer, the Difference Engine, back in 1822 (his wife, Ada Lovelace, was arguably the first programmer), it was never built in his life time. Instead, the plaudits for the first actual computer must go to Tommy Flowers.

While working at Bletchley Park during the war, Flowers designed Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, to break the German Lorenz cipher. Colossus was incredibly fast and could break the first part of the cipher (the chi setting) in less than 30 minutes. Later it was discovered that the computer could also be used for wheel breaking, which was the second part of breaking the code.

Sadly, after the war Colossus was broken down and kept a secret, so details of how it worked was not widely known. As such, it had little impact on the development of computers and modern computers are evolved from subsequent projects. However, the idea of Colossus helped everything.

Once this computer had been built, it was known that a high-speed electronic computer could be made reliably. It was this information that helped push the development of subsequent computers, so the importance of Colossus on the modern world should not be overlooked.

Tommy Flowers built the world’s first programmable computer during the war to break the German Lorenz code

8. THE EARLY HOME COMPUTER MARKET

It took until the late 70s and early 80s before computers were finally ready for mass-market use at home, but the UK really grabbed the opportunity by the horns. In a short period of time, we saw the launch of the BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC 464 – all of them incredibly popular in their own right.

While these computers saw limited success outside of the UK, with the US favouring its own brands, the impact of these computers shouldn’t be ignored. By giving UK consumers their first taste of home computers and gave people their first platform to program on.

It’s these initial computers that gave a lot of people in the UK their first taste of computers and has led to later success in a lot of fields.

The Spectrum was just one of the many UK home computers that helped a generation learn new skills

7. RASPBERRY PI

One of the problems with recent years has been that computers have become easier to use and kids are no longer exposed to programming, as they were in the early days of computing. The result is that education has moved away from teaching kids how to program and towards teaching them how to use applications, such as Excel.

The result is that the UK isn’t providing the IT industry with the skills that it desperately needs, which is where the Raspberry Pi Foundation steps in. Set up by Eben Upton and colleagues at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, the Foundation’s goal was to create a low-cost computer that would boot into a programming environment.

The Raspberry Pi was born and is now available for just £32 including VAT. Based around a mobile processor, this cheap computer boots from an SD card into a Linux operating system, which kids (and anyone, really) can use to learn how to program. It’s been well received by the education and IT markets alike all round the world. More importantly it could influence and help create a brand-new generation of programmers in this country.

The Raspberry Pi is designed to get kids programming again. It could just help revitalise our IT economy

6 THE DIGITAL AUDIO PLAYER

It’s hard to imagine a world without digital music players, but it was British Inventor that got there first. In 1979, Kane Kramer came up with the idea of a digital audio player, the IXI.

The player was the size of a credit card with a small mono LCD screen, and navigation and control buttons. It was designed to use bubble memory, although its 8MB capacity was only capable of storing around 3.5 minutes of audio – Kramer postulated that storage capacities would massively increase.

In addition to the player, Kramer also proposed a digital download service over telephone lines, letting people get music when they wanted it.

A UK patent was awarded in 1985 in the UK and 1987 in the US, but sadly the product wasn’t to be a success. After failing to raise £60,000 to renew the patent, the design entered the public domain. Other companies were then free to do their own thing.

In 2008 Apple called Kramer as a witness to defend itself against charges of patent infringement for the iPod, citing the IXI as prior art.

Long before Apple dreamed of the iPod, Kane Kramer invented the world’s first digital audio player, the IXI

5 PALMTOP COMPUTERS

It’s hard now to imagine a world without smartphones and tablets. Rather than something of recent invention, the portable computing world started back in 1989 thanks to a British computer company.

Distributed Information Processing (DIP) created its Pocket PC – a tiny computer powered by AA batteries, complete with a keyboard. This carry-everywhere computer attracted the attention of Atari, which released the product as the Portfolio: the world’s first palmtop computer. Fact fans should note that it’s the Portfolio that John Conner uses to hack the ATM machine in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

From the initial days of the palmtop computer came the first PDAs, leading to the development of the smartphone.

The Atari Portfolio, developed by a British company, gave the world its first taste of truly portable computing

4 MODERN COMPUTER GAMES

If there’s one area that the UK has really been a major part of, it’s computer games. Alan Turing, the Bletchley Park codebreaker, first postulated a chess game back in 1947, although the resulting program was only capable of computing “mate-in-two” games, rather than a full game.

In 1951, Alexander S. Douglas, a British professor of computer science, created OXO (Noughts and Crosses) the world’s first graphical computer game. In 1984, David Braben created the first 3D game with Elite.

The explosion of UK home computers, saw a huge number of UK based games developers emerge and create some of the most iconic games. There are still big studios based in the UK, too, such as Rockstar North, developer of the Grand Theft Auto titles and, under its old name of DMA Design, Lemmings.

The UK has long been involved in the games industry, creating classics, such as Lemmings

3. THE RESURGENCE OF APPLE

It’s hard to imagine now, but Apple was once a company that was in massive financial trouble. While the turnaround of the company is largely down to Steve Jobs, one of his key decisions was to make design a key part of all new products. The argument was to make products that weren’t just functional, such as the beige PCs of the time, but to make them beautiful and desirable.

For Jobs to achieve his aim, he needed a designer of some talent: Jonathan Ive. Born in Chingford, London, Ive has been responsible for the design of the majority of Apple’s iconic products including, the iMac, MacBook Air, iPod, iPod touch, iPhone and iPad.

Just one of those products on a designer’s CV would be enough for most people, but to do them all is incredible. By creating desirable products, Apple has managed to turn itself into one of the world’s most valuable companies. It’s also gone from the underdog to the company that everyone else wants to emulate.

By creating technology that wasn’t just functional but also incredibly attractive, Jonathan Ive helped revive Apple’s fortunes

2. ARM
Out of all the British IT companies, ARM Holdings plc is, arguably, the most important in today’s world. It’s this Cambridge-based company that designs the processors that are used in the vast majority of mobile phones and tablets, and is so important that even Microsoft has written a version of Windows 8 that will run on ARM architecture.

What’s particularly clever about the company is that it doesn’t actually manufacture processors, but licenses its intellectual property to other companies that then build their own CPUs. Currently, this includes Intel, Samsung, Nvidia, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments.

As well as being popular because it licenses its technology, ARM CPUs are noted for their low power consumption. Given the ever-growing number of smartphone and tablet computers, this feature is incredibly important and one that should see the company grow even more.

All of this comes from a company that started life as Acorn Computers Ltd, manufacturing the popular BBC Micro, as well as Archimedes range of computers. It helped kick-start the home computer revolution back then and is continuing to drive innovation and a new set of products in the mobile market today, making it the most important British computer company today.

ARM is responsible for the vast majority of smartphone and tablet CPUs, making it incredibly important

1. THE WORLD WIDE WEB

Although the internet, an interconnected network of computers, came out of the US military, the graphical world wide web, which we access through a web browser was created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
Working at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), he built a system called ENQUIRE in 1980, which was a personal database of people and software models. Each page in ENQUIRE was linked to another page via hypertext.

In 1984, he wrote a proposal for “a large hypertext database with typed links”, which generated very little interest. Instead, he sat down and developed himself the World Wide Web, developing the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) the first web browser, the first web server software, the first web server and the first webpages.

On the 6th August 1991, he posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project online and the web was officially made public. The rest, as they say, is history and the world has never been the same.

Can you imagine a world without the web? Thanks to Sir Tim Berners-Lee you don’t have to
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