Thoughts about the difference between European & American hardware and software design

[liam_on_linux]

I have just recently discovered that my previous post about Commodore BASIC went modestly viral, not only featuring on Hacknernews but getting its own story on HackadayGosh

Comments

Not to mention the transputer

[anonymous]

The demise of the British tech industry should be laid squarely at the feet of Margaret Thatcher. She de-funded and sold off Inmos, which was the chance for competitive British fab technology - then the US got a process advantage over the indigenous British tech, which meant Intel lead process wise (even though the CPU architecture was less than good), and that was the end of it. Many British computer scientists emigrated to the US and to a lessor extent Australia in a massive brain drain. And the British parallel processing tech which could have made its way into ARM was basically dead in the water, with Britain instead concentrating on financial services instead of actually making things.

Re: Not to mention the transputer

[liam_on_linux]

A fair point. I was too young, and not at all politically aware, at the time to know about such things.

INMOS certainly did a lot of pioneering stuff, yes, and deserved far more success.

Have you encountered XMOS, founded by David May in Bristol?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMOS

It is in some ways a successor company...

Good read

[ext_5474765]

As someone who came to this world from a ZX I am deeply touched by how You are writing about Basic. In a positive way! :)

Re: Good read

[liam_on_linux]

Thank you! :-)