> It was a huge success, so they gave up on it

This made me chuckle. I hear it again and again with regard to British innovation and entrepreneurship to the degree that it's almost a cliche, but would be interested to know if there's anything solid behind the idea (and that's not a snarky 'sources?' comment BTW, just genuinely interested to know if this supposed phenomenon has been substantiated). Is it just the case that circumstances conspired against the UK? Is there something in the culture that led the UK to give up too easily in favour of easy money elsewhere? Was the UK deliberately undermined by e.g. the US (Black Arrow, TSR2)?

Several books could be written on the subject. My personal recommendation is Francis Spufford's "Backroom Boys" https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/aug/14/featuresreview...

A lot of this needs to be seen in the context of post-imperial decline, and (in the 70s at least) serious financial difficulties. We could probably have made some of TSR2, Black Arrow, Magnox, APT, Concorde, Trident/Polaris, etc big successes with adequate funding, but we could never have done all of them. It looks like Concorde was one of the ones that was chosen to be funded to completion, partly due to the personal intervention of Tony Benn.

(Possible counterexample: the three V-bombers)

A lot of things were funded to the first failure but not to the first success. A common problem - NASA would never have been able to do what SpaceX did because the funding would have been pulled on the first failed landing, despite this being an anticipated part of the development plan.

In the private sector, any history of this would have to cover the class system and industrial action. Also CP Snow's "Two Cultures".

I would probably also list the UK's small mindedness towards immigration; the US was a magnet for fleeing scientists and intellectual refugees after the war. Much of SV's success is due to immigration or internal migration: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/30/us-tech-companies-founded-by...

The short answer is that the UK government from 1979 to 1997 was pretty hostile towards the entire idea, with the exception of a few specific pet projects like the BBC micro, and subsequent governments were lukewarm.

Some the projects were brilliant engineering but commercially never stood a chance like Concorde; other projects like the amalgamation of struggling private car companies as a part-nationalised state one were renowned for the sort of mediocrity and mismanagement that made privatisation and abandonment of industrial subsidies politically fashionable, even independently from those approaches helping pay for tax cuts.

The BBC Micro is arguably an outstandingly successful pivot instead. Promoting computer lessons at schools might have been a huge success in encouraging more parents to buy PCs, but parents bought commodity hardware running Windows/DOS, and after that it became natural for schools to shift towards purchasing the same thing with connectivity to the newfangled world wide web rather than Acorn's specialised systems providing educational wordprocessors with speech synthesis that ran on a floppy disk. Even without that trend, specialised hardware/software products specific for the UK educational market was never an ideal niche to be in anyway, whereas licensing ARM chips turned out to be a very lucrative and long term business for one of Acorn's subsidiaries instead.

I think this is a bit harsh, the current industrial strategy is pretty decent (https://www.gov.uk/government/topical-events/the-uks-industr...), whether they will deliver on this remains to be seen but it's not like they aren't thinking about industrial policy.

The scale of ambition is completely different. The Computer Literacy Project put a computer in every school and led to 141 TV programmes over a decade. At the highest levels of government, it was seen as an urgent priority. We wanted to be a world leader in software and we heavily invested to make that at least plausible on a per-capita basis.

Today, there's lots of ambition but very little follow-through. They talk a good game, but it's all piecemeal and penny-ante. It's very difficult to actually find out the specifics of what the government is spending, but it's abundantly clear that we're being left in the dust by China.

The UK may have wanted to be a world leader in software and may have heavily invested in education, but then they failed to keep their programmers by creating jobs that paid those developers a competitive enough salary to stay in the UK.

A huge portion of us left the country to take our software skills to countries we would be paid competitive salaries and have a high quality of life. Those countries are exploiting the UK's investment by offering a high quality of life and a streamlined path through their immigration policies, pillaging UK developers and negating the billions of dollars the UK spent to get ahead.

Having kept a close eye on the development market in the UK for the past 20 years, it's becoming apparent that there will never be an opportunity to bring our skills back home.

It's no good investing in education if you don't provide the opportunity for that education to bring long term benefit to the UK. You need to keep the people once you've trained them and they're just not going to stick around while other countries salaries and immigration policies make it easy to take those skills where they're going to be guaranteed easy access to a high quality of life. Those developers are never going to come back if they face the prospect of losing 80% of their salary and their partner not being able to work for for a period during the immigration process.

This is a huge gap that the UK seriously needs to look at. There's no point in having an industrial policy that trains people if you're just going to lose a huge portion of them at the end of that training, never to see them again.

We failed to capitalise on the advantages we had created. It has to be remembered that the Computer Literacy Project ended in 1989. The following decade was not kind to the British computer industry, in large part due to a lack of investment and leadership. Thatcher (for all her faults) was seriously committed to computing, but Major just didn't get it.

Uk programmer here, late 30s, in the last year or so I've woken up to the fact that we re getting terribly salaries in the uk. Reddit is full of naive europeans who seem to be brainwashed into thinking the USA is some racist hell hole and that "cost of living is cheaper in Europe" (as far as I can tell this is complete nonsense). Or that paying high taxes will give them a good pension (not in the UK).

As I live in Scotland I pay 40 percent tax on everything I earn over 41 thousand pounds.

I take it you went to the States ? Is it even possible for someone my age to get there to work?

I went to Canada. I won't lie, the immigration path is a pain in the ass, but it's doable, even as a late 30 year old. Toronto is one of the top places in the world for income vs. cost of living for a career in the development industry. Coming from the UK to the U.S. is troublesome, their H1B Visa Lottery for skilled workers from anywhere but India seem to be futile. I've attempted twice now and I've written it off as a waste of time. Perhaps there's another path I'm unaware of.

The U.S. may be considered a racist hell hole, but just like everywhere else, it's really the few loudest ones that make a bad name for everyone else. On the whole, Americans are wonderful people living in a system that offers them a reasonably high standard of living for a reasonable work/life balance. They've got some issues, just like any country.

They've got a shit political system that just occasionally manages to be a beacon of light and hope to the rest of the world; a shit debacle of a medical industry that somehow has a couple of shining examples that manage to stand shoulder to shoulder with the best hospitals in the world; and an education system that fails about as many as it helps, yet still somehow manages to pull out a few of the best schools in the world. Quite how this is, I'm not sure.

Don't let stereotypes and bad press colour your perspective of a culture you don't know anything about. Visit, go attend some interviews, spend time to find places there you love. Spend time with people. Form your own opinions. You may be surprised.

Can confirm - though I’m younger than the BBC Micro generation. After I got my BSc in CS I got a job offer from a west-coast FAANG company. My friends I went to uni with who are still in the UK doing jobs that require their degree make about 1/4 to 1/2 what I do, and I don’t even think I’m particularly good at what I do either. I note that at the pay-scales we’re talking about the “hidden” differences in CoL (like healthcare costs, etc) don’t really matter anymore.

  Today, there's lots of ambition but very little follow-through

Yeah, I definitely agree with this. Nothing to add really, hopefully when there is more political bandwidth for this sort of stuff things will change.

Your last words are ironic. Anyone writing on the subject at the time would have ended with "we're being left in the dust by Japan".

At the time, we were. Japan were miles ahead in the semiconductor industry, which was the key part of the computer industry in the 70s. Both Britain and Japan squandered their competitive advantages in a remarkably short period of time; Britain failed to effectively commercialise a large base of skilled software developers, while Japan failed to pivot into software and saw their semiconductor industry become commodified into irrelevance.

Technology changes on very short timescales. No advantage lasts for long, no matter how great that advantage might be. You have to keep investing, you have to keep experimenting, you have to be prepared to radically pivot, otherwise someone else will take advantage of your complacency and knock you out of the game.

I'm not anti Tory, but the crap with the "internet levy" that will be required to police "harmful content" doesn't really send signals to the rest of the world that the UK is a forward thinking future tech hub.