Daniel Wagner

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In 1967 an American entrepreneur with experience in the emerging field of ‘real time’ data processing arrived in the UK, intending to set up a software house. He was keen to plug into the local network of people who shared a common interest in the applications of this new technology, and organised a dinner for that purpose.

The evening was a huge success. Held in the Bourbon Room of the Institute of Directors’ headquarters on Belgrave Square, it was attended by twelve leading entrepreneurs and academics in the fledgling British computing industry. After dinner, each person described his interest in real time data processing and the group agreed to a subsequent meeting to discuss particular problems over a good meal.

From this unassuming start, the Real Time Club was born. Meetings became regular events and the original twelve diners were joined by other prominent figures from business, academia, government and the press. The format of a dinner followed by discussion and debate, usually led by an invited speaker, became an established tradition. A secretary emerged to organise speakers and venues, and a Chairman was eventually appointed to keep the increasingly lively debate sessions under control.

Deliberately free from formal structure, rules or a permanent meeting house, this loose association of people who shared a passion for challenging and changing the established norms of a hidebound society has flourished for forty-five years. Individually and collectively, members have influenced British society and its governments to use information technologies to help build a better world.

Was the Club a product of its time, or could it have emerged and thrived in any commercial environment? Will it be able to survive the continued changes in both the industry and its user communities, as real time computing becomes increasingly ubiquitous around the globe?

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Technology in Topsy-turvy Post-war Britain

Britain in the 1950’s and 1960’s seemed to be running at two speeds. The Attlee government had shaken the foundations of society with the creation of the first welfare state. Veterans recently returned from the war, and the armies of civilian labour who had kept the country’s industries working during their absence, were impatient for social improvements, jobs and education. Technological developments in transportation, communications and computing were irrevocably changing the speed at which business could be transacted, and demonstrating how quality of life at all levels of society could be radically improved.

But the old order was reluctant to accept the inevitability of change and the huge potential that electronics engineering offered to deliver economic prosperity. Britain’s Civil Service was still run by mandarins of the imperial establishment to whom ‘technology’ was a derisory occupation ranked somewhere below ‘trade’. As a result, the entrepreneurs struggling to build a computing industry in Britain found it difficult to find sympathetic or understanding allies in government.

One new technology, the production of atomic energy, did capture Whitehall’s imagination, but while the government backed the 1957 opening of the first industrial-scale atomic power station at Sellafield in Cumbria, it deliberately ignored home-grown computer manufacturers with its ‘buy-American’ policy. When challenged it upheld this policy as a way “to encourage inward investment”.

On the street, things were starting to look up. The rush to build housing to meet domestic demand, and the push to produce exports to balance the country’s trade deficit, fuelled a consumer boom that inspired a national ‘feel good’ factor. British ingenuity was claiming pride of place in rapidly expanding global markets. The Vickers Viscount was a huge success in the new commercial airline industry, the Jaguar and Austin Mini captured the luxury sports and economy segments of the motor vehicle markets, and British music, fashion and design were setting trends around the world. London was once again claiming centre stage, a position that inspired many young Britons with entrepreneurial instincts to dream of changing the world.

Despite this, the economy struggled under the burden of war debts, the cost of two additional conflicts (Korea and Suez), and the French veto of Britain’s application to join the European Economic Community. Moreover, the winds of change were slow to reach the old combatants in UK plc – management and the unions. Britain’s productivity levels were among the lowest in Europe and labour unrest was growing, while politicians and company directors made a series of poor decisions that resulted in the decline and/or failure of several key businesses and industries.

The persistent lack of support from government and an unhealthy industrial climate combined to drive many of Britain’s best technological developments off-shore, to countries that were quick to identify and capitalise on their commercial potential. It was 1964 before a government administration acknowledged the importance of a technology industry to the future of the British economy. Declaring that the Britain of the future would be forged in the “white heat of the scientific revolution”, Labour’s Harold Wilson created the first Cabinet post to oversee the development of British technology.

From 1966 to 1970 this post was held by Tony Benn, who demonstrated his staunch belief in the need to break down the old order by renouncing the peerage he inherited from his father, Lord Stansgate. Despite Benn’s tireless energy, however, the government’s ambivalence to direct interference in the affairs of business remained a millstone around the necks of young visionaries who needed direct government support to help them build a domestic industry in the face of growing competition from the US.

Among its many scientific achievements, Britain was at the forefront of the development of the modern computer. One hundred years after Charles Babbage produced his mechanical Analytical Engine, a team working at the Bletchley Park code breaking centre used electronics to speed up the calculation process. Their Colossus code breaking machine is cited by many as the earliest modern computer. For others, however, the true origin of the modern information society was the design of another Bletchley Park alumnus, Alan Turing, for a stored programme computer. Turing’s blueprint formed the basis of the first working machines built by rival teams at Manchester (Baby) and Cambridge (EDSAC) universities.

Remarkably, the first commercial computer was built by a catering company, J Lyons Ltd, to manage stock control for its chain of teashops. Inspired by research from Cambridge, the LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) was sold all over the world, but the company, unable to obtain the finance it needed to expand, was eventually merged into International Computers Limited (ICL), Tony Benn’s attempt to create a British computer company that could compete with world leaders, IBM. Although the country clearly lacked the conditions to exploit its developments in the commercial marketplace, its research and technological expertise was recognised around the world. American companies were keen to gain access to British technology and often did so through joint ventures. For example, in the early 1960’s the National Cash Register Company teamed up with Elliott-Automation to provide that company with much needed marketing muscle, first for the National Elliot 400 series and later the 803, the first solid state processor, which was partly designed by RTC member Iann Barron while still a student at Cambridge.

But despite Britain’s early technological lead, by the time Alan Marshall arrived in London from the US in 1967 to start a branch of his software house, Computer Systems International (CSI), the struggling British computer hardware industry comprised only a handful of major players (ICT, English Electric, EMI and Elliott-Automation). Working quietly at the fringes, there was also a small but influential group of researchers in the academic community, and an equally small but determined group of entrepreneurs running service and software companies.

As one of the early members of the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) design team based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Marshall had spent ten years working on radar technology, “the essence of real time computing”, for the US Air Force and Navy. In 1964 he left to take up a project in Sweden, where he stayed to start his software house, CSI.

Three years later he decided to expand his business into the UK market. Soon after his arrival in London he began to seek out people who shared his interest in the commercial possibilities of high speed data processing. With the assistance of freelance computer journalist Rex Malik, he met several of this new breed of entrepreneur, starting with Dick Evans, who had founded Timesharing Limited based on a licence from Bolt Beranek and Newman in Boston, Massachusetts.

Evans put him in touch with a number of others, including Stanley Gill at Imperial College; Jim Foord at Rolls Royce; Roger Needham at the Cambridge University Mathematics Laboratory; Donald Davies at the National Physics Laboratory; Paddy Sanford-Johnson at Rank-Xerox; Pat O’Donnell at the International Publishing Company (IPC); Keith Corliss of CEIR; H. Lane of Shell Oil; Peter Herman of BOAC; Philip Hughes, who founded Logica; Roger Wesson of Vickers; Derek Carter of Hawker Siddeley Dynamics; and Charles Ross, who had just sold his group of real-time computing companies to International Publishing Corporation (IPC) to set up International Data Highways Ltd.

Although they were all working at the same technological frontier there had been little time for communication between these pioneers, so rather than pursue each of his new contacts individually, Marshall invited them to a dinner to get acquainted. Eleven people accepted his invitation. Marshall distinctly recalls that Mark Thompson, Managing Director of CSI, decided not to attend, as his presence would make the numbers up to an unlucky thirteen! The choice of venue, everyone agreed, was pleasingly ironic – here was a group of youthful entrepreneurs bent on revolutionising the old order, dining in the Georgian opulence of the Establishment’s symbolic citadel, the Institute of Directors’ headquarters on Belgrave Square.

Talk over drinks and dinner revolved around the challenges of building a software and computing services industry in the post-imperial, post-war climate of 1960’s Britain. Towards the end of the evening, each diner was invited to introduce himself and his interest in real time computing, and it was agreed to meet again. Calling themselves the ‘Real Time Users Group’, the diners published notification of their first official meeting, held on 27^th June 1967, in both the Financial Times and the Guardian.

Although the group was first and foremost a dining club, the ‘Real Timers’ quickly recognised that collectively they had the power to influence the political, commercial and social environment within which they were trying to build a new industry. There was an unwritten agreement that they would be able to exert pressure within the industry more effectively if the major hardware suppliers were excluded from their meetings, but journalists, politicians and civil servants were seen to be more advantageous allies, and these were to be invited as both members and presenters over the years.

The creaking telecommunications infrastructure in 1960’s Britain was a major inconvenience to commercial and private users alike, but members of the fledgling Real Time Club felt they were paying an unduly high price in terms of lost business opportunities for themselves and their industry.

According to an article appearing in the 5^th November, 1966 issue of Business Week magazine, Intinco Ltd, a company co-founded by Charles Ross, had introduced its revolutionary SCAN (Stockmarket Computer Answering Network) system to traders on the London Stock Exchange at least four months before a similar real time system would be available on Wall Street. In the post war race to establish national excellence in emerging technologies this was a real coup for Britain, yet the delays in obtaining new telephone lines meant that London clients were waiting up to six months to have their systems operational.

For Dick Evan’s Timesharing Ltd, Britain’s first online service bureau, the shortage of exchanges and poor quality of lines was creating both service and cash flow difficulties at a critical time in the company’s development. Problems like these were being echoed around the Real Time Club dinner table, so it wasn’t long before some members of the group began to think of ways to convince the General Post Office (GPO), which operated the national telephone network at the time, to upgrade its infrastructure.

In early 1968 a small sub-group of Real Timers, led by Ross, proposed a demonstration of Britain’s capability in shared access systems, aimed primarily at the House of Commons’ Select Committee of Science and Technology. Major General L.E.C.M. Perowne of the Royal Corps of Signals was appointed to organise what would turn out to be the first exhibition of all the on-line, real-time computer services available in the country at that time.

In his initial planning document, Perowne stated that the group’s objectives were “to demonstrate to important members of the Government Departments concerned … the progress being made in this area of computer application in business; and to show that, in this context, the technological gap between the UK and USA has been substantially narrowed, if not eliminated.”

The longer term objective, Perowne continued, was to “influence Government to ensure the timely provision of adequate resources, particularly in telecommunications, to enable full benefit to be derived from the revolutionary developments in technique now entering the stage of practical application on a wide scale.”

In other words, don’t let the GPO hold back progress in Britain!

Planning for the event, which they called ‘Conversational Computing on the South Bank’, commenced in April and proceeded with military precision. The Meeting Room of the Royal Festival Hall, chosen for its close proximity to Westminster, was hired for the 3^rd of July 1968, when eleven organisations would demonstrate their systems. Professor Stanley Gill, Director of the Centre for Computing and Automation at Cambridge University and President of the British Computer Society, agreed to Chair a presentation, with several of the more influential guests invited to attend a luncheon for further discussions.

The group aimed high in composing its guest list. Tony Benn, as Minister for Technology, declined his invitation, but his Joint Parliamentary Secretary, Dr Jeremy Bray, accepted. The Select Committee, chief target of the demonstration, was unable to accept in an official capacity because to do so would mandate a report back to the House of Commons, but several interested members managed to attend individually – despite competition for their time from a Test Match, the Henley Regatta and Wimbledon!

Many of the systems on display were at the forefront of global developments. Guests were able to view working demonstrations from the University of Cambridge, Queen Mary College (University of London), Timesharing Limited, Culham Laboratory (UKAEA), Atomic Warfare Research Establishment, the University of Edinburgh, the National Physical Laboratory, De La Rue Bull Machines Limited, International Data Highways Limited, British European Airways and The Rank Organisation.

With the support of the Postmaster General, Perowne had been able to get ten special telephone lines allocated for exhibitors’ use, so that all the systems were online to computers located around the country for the duration of the exhibition. JHH Merriman, the GPO’s Senior Director of Development, was appointed to make a statement outlining what the GPO was doing in the matter of data transmission lines for the future.

To the surprise of many, the text of Merriman’s speech re-affirmed the GPO’s conviction that its existing programme for infrastructure development was sufficient to meet all forecast voice and data transmission needs for the foreseeable future. He lauded the GPO’s own Datel system for data transmission, and somewhat arrogantly threw the ball back at the Real Timers with a series of ‘what do you guys really want’ questions. Imagine their sense of vindication, when, at the height of the show, as live demonstrations were in full swing, the telephone lines carrying data traffic to and from the exhibition hall juddered to a halt!

Merriman managed to come up with a list of GPO ‘over-ride’ numbers that enabled the show to continue with few people realising what had happened, and Perowne graciously made no mention of this glitch in his summing up report, wherein he noted that many of the 200 Members of Parliament, Senior Civil Servants, industrialists and academics had expressed keen interest in what they had seen.

For the ambitious Real Timers, however, Dr Bray’s invitation to submit, in writing, a considered response to Mr Merriman’s exposition on behalf of the Post Office marked the real success of the day and the beginning of four decades of the challenge and influence that would come to define the Club.

What the Real Timers were intent on achieving was no less than the creation of the first universal data network – in effect, the Internet as we know it today. Their vision stemmed from the work of Donald Davies of the National Physical Laboratory, who had developed the original packet switching algorithms. It was his design for a Stored Program Computer Controlled Data Transmission Network that opened the possibility for a telecommunications infrastructure of sufficient speed, quality and cost effectiveness to enable the kind of business traffic envisioned by the early real time service creators.

Their concerns were twofold: firstly, the Americans had seen the packet switching technology and were moving rapidly to overcome their own internal barriers to implementing a national network; and secondly, demand for such a service in the UK was driving an alarming growth in privately developed networks that would be incompatible with each other. The Real Timers knew that Britain’s economic growth could potentially be retarded for decades if the country did not develop its own national infrastructure quickly.

So over the next two years, while the Club continued to meet, dine and debate on a regular basis, several individuals worked tirelessly to capitalise on their Royal Festival Hall triumph and continue lobbying for a change of GPO policy.

In the weeks following the Festival Hall demonstration, a steady stream of coverage in the press kept the Club’s position firmly on the public stage. The leading national and industry papers watched developments closely, as the following quotes make plain:

“yesterday the deep division in opinion on how [shared computer services] should be provided in Britain between the Post Office on the one hand and users and makers of time-sharing systems on the other was made abundantly clear.” (Financial Times, 4^th July, 1967)

“Among questions basically left unanswered at the seminar were the effect on both the economics and efficiency of the GPO network of long period data transmissions calls … on a network designed for use in time periods of minutes” (Computer Weekly, 4^th July, 1967)

“The benefits claimed by the NPL proposals are immense” (Electronics Weekly, 10^th July, 1967)

Several Real Timers used the access they had to Members of Parliament to have judiciously worded questions asked in the House, and politicians from all parties were regularly invited to attend Club dinners.

In August 1968, Lord Bowden of Chesterfield convened a working party with a mandate to investigate the feasibility of establishing a network as set out in Davies’ proposals and Gill’s speech at the Royal Festival Hall. At the same time, Dick Evans, Philip Hughes and Stan Gill began work on a major technical paper that was presented to the Post Office Economic Development Committee on 28^th November, 1969. Entitled, Real Time Computing Systems: The Communications Problem and Possible Solutions, this 40 page document explored both the nature of real time computing and the problems with current GPO systems, proposing designs for the kind of store and forward network the group believed was needed.

By this time, the issue of the telecommunications system in the UK was gaining wider interest, and the Club managed to recoup some of the cost of producing its report by selling over 250 copies. More importantly, the GPO seemed finally to be taking notice. In May 1970, coinciding quite remarkably with a presentation by the Real Time Club to Sub-Committee ‘D’ of the Select Committee on Science and Technology, an outline proposal for a data network – identical to the design proposed by the Club – was circulated and discussed within the Post Office. By April 1971, Merriman himself gave a policy statement which included a target date for implementing such a network.

But the process was painfully slow for the Real Timers. In a further Memorandum of Evidence, this time submitted to Sub-Committee ‘A’ of the Select Committee on Science and Technology in April 1971, they noted:

“In July 1968 we gave two forecasts: one pessimistic and unacceptable, and the other desirable. The pessimistic forecast envisaged a policy statement in 1970. Events are lagging behind even this …”

Eventually, the GPO accepted the suggestion that a pilot network be installed. The pilot was to be designed for the academic community, linking university research facilities together in what was the beginning of the Joint Academic NETwork (JANET).

Unbelievably, when the Civil Service finally agreed to fund the project it was on condition that no commercial company could benefit from it, proving yet again in the minds of the struggling Real Time entrepreneurs that the government was the enemy. As Ross put it:

“The US and French governments gave their computer industries defence and research contracts. Ours gave us trouble.”

It would be the mid-1980’s before UK plc became a full playing member of the Internet-enabled world that, ironically, had been made possible through British-designed technology.

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The Power of Influence

Although they chafed at the ponderous movement of the government machine, the Real Timers enjoyed significant influence in the corridors of power. Many of the members who led the Club, having been officers in the Armed forces’ National Service, were comfortable debating with government officials as equals. Basil Cousins was in the Russian section of the Royal Navy; Bill Freyenfeld was a Captain in the Education Corps; Iann Barron, at 23 years of age, was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Royal Signals; and Bryan Mills, Brian Oakley and Charles Ross were Subalterns in the Intelligence Corps, Royal Signals and Royal Artillery respectively.

Entrepreneurs and academics of today may look back with envy at the very different way in which politicians interacted with interest groups during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Ross remembers the buzz of working within IPC, owners of the Daily Mirror newspaper group, whose support had helped win the election for the Labour party. As a result of the publisher’s political loyalties, senior members of staff had access to the ear of anyone they wanted within government. This connection may well have persuaded certain politicians to accept invitations to attend meetings and demonstrations, although it was by no means the only source of political influence within the Club.

A not uncommon practice of the day was for politicians to lend their influence for the benefit of commercial organisations, earning a small stipend for themselves in the process, by taking Directorships. In the early 1970’s Eric Lubbock, MP was on the IPC payroll and Kenneth Baker, MP was on the Board of Philip Hughes’ Logica. The occasional judicious question, composed, no doubt, during a rowdy debate at the Real Time Club, would be raised in the House during those years, helping to influence government thinking on an industry it clearly did not understand.

For example, when the Metropolitan Police set up its first computer system in the early 1970’s it chose a (American) Burroughs computer off the drawing board rather than a working (British) ICL machine. This was in accordance with government policy of the day, which favoured inward investment of hardware manufacturing from abroad over the development of a British computing industry. There had also been no provision in the Met’s project budget for software, showing how little Whitehall understood about computers and their operation.

The lack of government support for the development of domestic capabilities, in sharp contrast to policies of other European and the American governments, incensed the Real Timers. At their instigation, Eric Lubbock formulated a very pointed question to be put to the House, but, ever the experienced politician, took care to notify the Minister of Technology, Tony Benn, of its wording in advance. Imagine the Club’s delight when Lubbock took the floor to ask what the government was doing to support the British computing industry, and Benn responded instantly that his department had just set up a Central Computer Agency (CCA)!

RTC member Reay Atkinson, the career Department of Trade and Industry man who was eventually appointed to head up the CCA, remembers well the environment within which the Club emerged as a group of people worth listening to.

“At the end of the 1960’s we had a government that was essentially hardware oriented. The emerging software industry felt it was being excluded from both government thinking and government purchasing, at the expense of not just the individual players in the industry but the future of the UK economy as a whole. That is why we had such an influential group of people, who were commercial competitors outside the Club, coming together to help persuade government to adopt more forward thinking policies.”

And the government did begin to listen. The Real Time Club was frequently invited to give evidence to Select Committees on Science and Technology as they began to take a wider interest in computing. These were important briefings because, although no decisions were taken at Select Committee level, they were used by politicians of all parties as a venue to become familiar with current issues.

The Real Time Club was also consulted on Post Office proposals for increased telecommunications charges, and the development of a European Computer Communications Network (COST).

Brian Oakley, head of the Science and Engineering Research Council and later director of the Alvey Programme, also recalls the influence of the Club:

“There is no doubt that the idea of real time computing became embedded in ministerial minds during the seventies and I’m quite certain the Real Time Club had a very significant influence over their thinking … but I’m equally certain that not a single minister would ever admit to it!”

The original band of twelve diners rapidly grew to a core group of 36 by the end of 1970. Membership was by invitation only, with the requirement that candidates had to be “ambitious and enthusiastic for IT, and prepared to give some time and effort to push IT forward in the interests of the whole Community”.

The result was an eclectic mix of highly motivated individuals, all very much aware that they were working at the forefront of a revolution in society. The original entrepreneurs were soon joined by Iann Barron, designer of the NE803 and later the Modular One, precursor to the personal computer; J Harwell, who designed the first programming language (‘H’) in 1959; Roger Needham, who wrote one of the first operating systems in 1965; Roy Goodman, founder of the Infotech Ltd training and conference company, plus several entrepreneurs who had started consulting houses.

There were academics but they, too, did not fit the traditional mould. Stan Gill, Director of the Centre for Computing and Automation at Cambridge University, was described by one member as “the only academic entrepreneur I have ever known”. Other pioneering computer academics on the RTC membership roles in those early years included Roger Needham (Cambridge) and Bob Parslow (Brunel University).

In addition, there were several senior IT directors from Blue Chip organisations who needed to be plugged in to developments in telecommunications in order to ensure they remained at the competitive edge in their own markets. People such as Colin Alexander (Burmah-Castrol), D.F. Belsey (George Wimpey & Co Ltd), Jim Foord (Rolls Royce Ltd), E.F. Mellen (The Plessey Co Ltd), A.F. Teal (Shell-Mex & BP Ltd), John Wootton (Freeman, Fox and Partners), Colin Southgate (Software Sciences Ltd and later Director of the Bank of England) and S. Randall (Inter-Bank Research Organisation) were regular attendees at Club dinners.

The inclusion of a select group of leading industry journalists helped to establish the Club as a serious voice of the industry in the British press. Rex Malik, an independent investigative journalist, was instrumental in helping Alan Marshal establish the club and remained a central figure in its operations for many years. In 1968 he introduced Nancy Foy, the editor of Time-Sharing News who had recently arrived from California, and a third member of the press, Computer Weekly’s Chris Hipwell, was invited to join in 1970. For decades these three used the Club as their informal information network, quietly supporting it through their writing, yet never breaking the sanctity of the Chatham House rules under which all meetings were conducted.

Most people attended their first Club dinner either as the speaker for the evening, or as the invited guest of another member. Applications did not exist – you knew you had a shot at becoming a member yourself if someone bothered to tell you the date and location of the next meeting. From April 1969 until he eventually resigned in 1994, this job was done with quiet efficiency by Mike Plumbe, himself invited by Alan Marshall in late 1968.

As early as 1970, demand for membership triggered an identity crisis among the original founders. Concerned that by taking all comers they risked turning their rather exclusive dining club into ‘just another society’, they decided to limit membership to 40, with new members accepted only to fill vacancies. By 1974, however, the list of active members had already grown to 50, and enquiries for membership were pouring in.

By 1972 Government had started taking notice of the issues raised by the Real Timers. Over the next few years, several Ministers were to find that time spent enjoying Club hospitality and debates could be informative as well as entertaining. The Post Office was beginning work on the pilot network design put forward by the Club, while changes in the economic and political landscape drew most members’ attention back into the challenges within their own businesses.

But although the intense lobbying of the late 1960’s had subsided, members carried on dining and discussing the development of their industry. Rex Malik put forward a proposal to orchestrate the establishment of a business computing research and teaching organisation allied to a prominent UK university, but although the Club backed the idea, it became a concept rather than a cause.

It was Reay Atkinson, recently appointed Director of the government’s Central Computer Agency, who suggested in early 1975 that the Real Time Club had a more important role to play in the future development of the computerised world.

In a letter to Mike Plumbe, Atkinson expressed the view that the “utterly remarkable group of people” assembled in the Real Time Club “could do an immensely important and creative job within its own membership on first charting the probable course of future developments and then in bringing pressure to bear at least in an attempt to see that progress was made”. His suggestion quickly led to the idea of ‘study weekends’.

In November 1975 twenty-one RTC’ers, fully half the membership at the time, attended what became the first of three such conferences to be held in the Brighton area. The object of the first meeting was “to discuss the development of computer technology (1975 – 1985) and its effect on the market in limited areas”. The group hoped to launch the results of their deliberations at a meeting to be hosted by Ken Warren, MP at the House of Commons the following March.

With the benefit of hindsight, their discussions were prophetic. The expectation of dramatic falls in the price of both hardware and software over the ensuing ten years set the scene. Delegates called for standardisation, particularly in software, to enable more rapid market penetration and lower prices, and they advised that the major limitation on the use of large electronic storage was the cost of data input and output, not hardware.

Interestingly, this largely entrepreneurial group of industrial renegades concluded that the industry was, and would continue to be, driven by marketing, not technology as most observers believed. They also suggested that the vast majority of the systems work of the day was (already) routine and uninteresting.

Twenty-four members attended the second study weekend in 1976 to debate the Club’s old bugbear, ‘Communications’, and the GPO. Discussions focused on the dominance of IBM, which was steadily encroaching on international markets, and the combined frustrations of high cost and service delays that were forced on the market by the monopolistic position of the Post Office.

By this time teletext (Viewdata) technology had been introduced, raising the prospect of delivering information into people’s homes, so the discussions moved on to consider what home users would do with the ability to store and send data electronically. The meeting concluded that both the GPO and the government were erring on the side of hardware-centric thinking; many members felt that the Real Time Club should try to influence attitudes towards system rather than hardware thinking.

The third gathering in 1977 turned its attention to the impact of changing technology on people and society. A trade union representative was invited to give the view from the shop floor, as the Real Timers debated the impact of increased digitisation on employment, education and home life in the 1980’s. Already, voices like Iann Barron were suggesting that the technology itself was largely irrelevant and the main issues were around applicability and use. Serious consideration was given to the suggestion that the industry should call a halt on further development to enable society to integrate and adjust to the changes already introduced by computers.

Towards the end of 1977 Ken Warren, MP had introduced Sir Keith Joseph, MP, the new Minister for Technology, to the Real Time Club. Joseph’s interest in learning about the industry led to the organisation of an extraordinary meeting in March 1978, the purpose of which was to give him a general briefing on a wide range of issues. Each Club member was invited to submit a written brief, and to take the floor for not longer than one minute – a serious handicap for the more verbose among them!

Members outlined their views on the short and long term development prospects for the industry, what the RTC believed the government’s attitude and policies on computing should be, and the future role of the still problematic Post Office.

Hopes ran high that the Club could exert greater influence on government policy when Joseph suggested a further meeting with representatives of the RTC to discuss the latter issue in more depth. Sadly, delegates to that meeting later reported that the Minister’s un-stated agenda had been to gain support for his own view that de-monopolisation was the answer, a position which the Club could not fully support.

Sir Keith did go on to commission an internal look at government policy towards information and communication technologies, Out of this study emerged the All Party IT Committee and the Parliamentary Computer Forum which eventually merged to form the Parliamentary Information Technology Committee (PITCOM) in 1981. The purpose of the Committee was to ensure that Parliament was well informed about information technologies and to spearhead the use of those technologies to run Parliamentary business. Needless to say, there has been considerable dialogue between PITCOM and industry over the ensuing years, with the Real Time Club taking an active role.

The Club’s final study weekend was held in March 1979 at the Ashridge Management Centre. Under the theme of ‘Information Transfer’, demonstrations were given of the latest teletext technology from the likes of Viewdata, Ceefax, Infoline and PLATO. Delegates, many of whom had fought a decade earlier for the establishment of a universal data network based on packet switching, dismissed these technologies as unsophisticated. Their frustration when the Post Office launched its own expensive version of teletext (Prestel) the following year was understandably immense.

The heated discussions at Club dinners over the Government’s handling of research into artificial intelligence, from the 1970’s through to the Alvey programme in the early 1980’s, provide a useful illustration of the nature of Real Time Club style debate. In 1973 Cambridge University Professor Sir James Lighthill wrote his Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey for the British Science Research Council. In it he divided the subject into three distinct areas of endeavour: work to emulate the way the brain thinks, robotics, and research into how brain circuitry can be translated into electronic circuitry.

Real Timers were enamoured with the idea that computers could be taught to think – here was a way to shake up society and demonstrate the power of their machines! They believed all three of the identified aspects of artificial intelligence were interlinked, so Lighthill’s suggestion that future research should tackle each area separately produced howls of protest. Members were even more incensed when it appeared that the net effect of the report was to remove government backing for research into the areas of robotics and artificial language, which RTC’ers believed to be essential.

Suspecting another ploy by the Civil Service to protect its own and reject anything that sounded like technology, the Club invited Alex d’Agapayeff of CAP to give a talk on the AI programme. Brian Oakley recalls that debate as:

“one of the best evenings of my life. d’Agapeyeff came to speak on artificial intelligence and, typically, the crowd started interrupting and heckling him. He tore up his notes, took the members full on, and eventually had them eating out of his hand!”

The debates continued for the rest of the decade. Then, in 1982 the Japanese government launched its Fifth Generation Computer Systems project, which aimed to build a supercomputer with usable artificial intelligence capabilities. The move, by the world’s acknowledged leader in the consumer electronics and automotive fields, so alarmed the US and Europe that they quickly set up projects of their own (the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation and the European Strategic Program of Research in Information Technology (ESPRIT), respectively).

The British government response was to set up the Alvey Programme, through which it proposed to channel investment in precompetitive research in order to gear up the British information technology industry. There were five strands of technology in the programme, including artificial intelligence. Brian Oakley, the appointed head of the programme, recalls the Club being largely supportive of everything except that one contentious area.

Philip Virgo has a different recollection. “As Basil Ferranti pointed out in one Club meeting, the whole programme was misconceived,” he claims.

“Alvey was pure research, and everyone knew that research was only one percent of the total cost of bringing new ideas to market. Besides, the Japanese strategy in these things had always been to get other people to crack the problems they hadn’t worked out so they could then exploit the technology. My suggestion, which annoyed Brian (Oakley) very much, was that we should take our research scientists out and shoot them before they had the chance to produce yet more bright ideas for the Japanese to borrow, thereby destroying what was left of the British economy!

“Now, looking back, what did the Alvey Programme achieve? The answer is, that annoying predictor software you find in Microsoft Office, which was actually written by Logica using Alvey research and algorithms. And since Microsoft, not Logica, made the money out of it, the Real Timers’ arguments turned out to be right.”

That the Club and the businesses of many of its members had survived the turbulent 1970’s is a tribute to their hard work and tenacity. The decade had seen post-war Britain nearly brought to its knees. Described as the ‘sick man of Europe’, the country wrestled with the dual economic diseases of rising inflation and continuing labour unrest.

Rather than invest in new infrastructure and innovation, successive governments seemed determined to prop up the dying foundations of Britain’s earlier industrial era in an uninspired policy of ‘managing decline’. Shipbuilding, railroads, and the steel and textiles industries gobbled up vast sums of Treasury money, as did behemoth organisations such as British Leyland, BSA and ICL, before all eventually disappeared from the economic landscape.

For Real Timers, the change of government in 1970 to Ted Heath’s Conservatives seemed a perfect opportunity to put forward policy recommendations to support the growth of the struggling UK computer industry. These included the provision of investment grants rather than loans, the abolition of Import Duties that were adversely affecting the cost of parts and equipment, a reorganisation of the Government’s R&D support, a publicly owned communications network, and measures to set up international communications standards to allow free flow of data and services across national boundaries.

However, instead of supporting the industry, one of Heath’s first actions on coming to office was to cancel the Industrial Re-organisation Corporation, contributing to the demise of a number of promising start-ups in IT.

In 1973 Heath decided to take a stand against yet another national strike, this time in the coal industry. Unfortunately, the walk out coincided with OPEC price rises and production cuts that triggered fuel shortages and inflation, which topped 26% in 1975, and eventually brought down the government.

Many businesses feared they would not survive the decade, which saw both the three-day workweek and the Winter of Discontent. With venture capital for technology projects virtually non-existent and the country’s own national computer company, ICL, on the terminal list, Real Timers worried about the menace of IBM, whose seemingly unstoppable course to global domination of the industry was ironically being aided by the British government’s continued policy of purchasing the American company’s systems for its own needs.

By 1980 the Club’s appetite for further study weekends had waned, and in 1981 Mike Plumbe raised the question of its future direction. The industry was changing rapidly, with the fore-runners of the ubiquitous personal computer being introduced and economic activity in many developed countries shifting from manufacturing to service-based industries where information technologies had not yet found their niche. It was time for a re-think.

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