5 ms·

Amstrad Emailer, the UK’s first smartphone

43 points by atombender 4y ago

KuiN 4y ago
My favourite thing about the Emailer is it was often stylised E-m@iler, which is the most incredibly 2000s branding.
jonatron 4y ago
You can just about see one in an early episode of The Apprentice here: https://youtu.be/5xwW0TWO9nY?t=3345 https://youtu.be/5xwW0TWO9nY?t=3345 . Anyone know when they ditched the emailer from The Apprentice?
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  Glad I'm not the only one that remembers this cameo, it was there way longer than it should have been IIRC.
- pomatic 4y ago
  It was featured on The Apprentice right up until it was discontinued, but I don't actually know when that was off hand.
didntreadarticl 4y ago
The UK had Amstrad, Sinclair, Acorn (which sortof became Arm) What have we got now? When I look up the UKs biggest tech companies now its people like Aveva and Sage who make dull enterprisey software. Is there anyone else? edit: I guess we might still have some big game studios? edit: I'll also take websites, has the UK got any big website companies? Seems like our biggest are Rightmove and Autotrader
- agd 4y ago
  There are lots of tech companies (e.g. Fintech, games etc) however not much hard tech. Like the rest of Europe, we're completely reliant on the US/Asia for cutting edge chips and phones.
  - didntreadarticl 4y ago
    tell me about the big fintech and games ones
    - michaelt 4y ago
      If you look at, for example, the UK entries in [1] you'll find many of them are doing loans, payments, insurance and blockchain stuff. (Admittedly, that list is using a definition of 'startup' broad enough to include the UK's second-largest energy supply company) [1] https://sifted.eu/rankings/european-unicorn-startups https://sifted.eu/rankings/european-unicorn-startups
- RobotToaster 4y ago
  ARM I guess?
  - didntreadarticl 4y ago
    Still in Cambridge but owned by Japans SoftBank Group. Does that count? When I look up 'UKs biggest tech companies' ARM doesnt get a mention.
- chrisjc 4y ago
  I've probably posted it several times now, but there's a great acquired podcast about ARM. https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/arm-softbank https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/arm-softbank
- mark_undoio 4y ago
  I don't think there are many big UK computer companies that haven't been absorbed by something else. There was Microfocus: https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/home https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/home They owned SuSE at one time. But MicroFocus now have owners outside the UK. And there was Autonomy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Autonomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Autonomy Bought by HP, leading to lots of controversy and legal wrangling when they did get what they had expected.
  - masfuerte 4y ago
    Many Autonomy people went to Darktrace. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darktrace https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darktrace
  - stevekemp 4y ago
    Microfocus is a name I've not heard in a good few years - the last time I heard of them was for their COBOL compilers, on SCO Unixware.
    - mark_undoio 4y ago
      They're still making COBOL compilers, as far as I know - targeting Linux and with some modern style Dev tools too. I guess it's a migration path for people getting rid of big iron but unable or uninterested in getting rid of the code they ran.
- rowanajmarshall 4y ago
  > I guess we might still have some big game studios? We've got Creative Assembly (owned by Japan-based Sega), Rockstar North (previously DMA Design and founded the GTA series, now owned by US-based Rockstar ofc), Jagex (owned by a US PE company), and a whole host of others mostly now owned by US companies. There's a piece of wisdom floating around that the UK is actually really good at building tech and tech-adjacent companies, bu really bad at scaling them beyond a certain point. We don't have the BigTech companies China and the US do (nobody does, really), but we're a pretty open economy that American firms are comfortable doing business with, so lots of promising companies get acquired before they hit _big_.
  - mike_hearn 4y ago
    Yes there's a lot of firms that are actually in some senses UK companies from a tech perspective, but are owned by Americans. I used to work for one. All the engineering work was done out of the UK. The US focused on sales. Funnily enough, when we started working together I was getting drinks with the CEO and I mentioned I seemed to have spent my whole life working for Americans. He laughed and said he'd spent his whole life working for Brits (his background was finance).
  - maxbaines 4y ago
    Good piece of wisdom, I had not thought about it but I think you make a valid point, it applies to other industries too. Not sure there is anything wrong with the approach, I would rather be innovating than maintaining.
- mark_undoio 4y ago
  Oh and, also: Raspberry Pi https://www.raspberrypi.org/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/ Definitely deserves a mention as it at least has quite big mind share. And Frontier: https://www.frontier.co.uk/ https://www.frontier.co.uk/ Who develop various games including, possibly most famously in these circles, Elite Dangerous.
- vidarh 4y ago
  > What have we got now? Graphcore. Semiconductor company doing accelerators for machine learning, based in Bristol. Raised $200m at a $1.7bn valuation in 2018. EDIT2: There's also XMOS in Bristol, which has taken about $100m in funding over the years, but have no idea what their valuation is like. Also (fabless) semiconductor company that seems to have sort-of pivoted towards AI acceleration similar to Graphcore. > edit: I'll also take websites, has the UK got any big website companies? Seems like our biggest are Rightmove and Autotrader Hopin (virtual events; raised about $1bn) Cazoo (online car sales; about 2k employees) Deliveroo (food delivery; market cap of about 1.6bn) Snyk is now apparently Boston based, but was founded in London (cybersecurity); this is a common issue for the European startup space, but perhaps especially so for the UK since startups here tends to target English-speaking markets from the start, in that the incentive to move the companies to the US are pretty significant. Revolut, sort of. Bank license in Lithuania, founders are Russian and Ukrainian, but headquartered in London. EDIT: Babylon Health. "Online first" healthcare provider offering both NHS and private GP services via app/video as the first instance (with offline facilities to complement with face to face examinations when needed). About 2k employees; took about $550m funding at a $2bn valuation in 2019
  - coding_unit_1 4y ago
    Starling Bank would be a better example than Revolut.
  - samstave 4y ago
    How can you say money laundering for the Eastern Bloc Mafia without saying you're doing money laundering for the Eastern Bloc Mafia ; "Revolut, sort of. Bank license in Lithuania, founders are Russian and Ukrainian, but headquartered in London." - On a serious note: can we determine if any of the Ukranian AIDE went into / through this 'bank'? The City Of London is the money laundering capital - with all their insturments pointing to the companies/countries of the Panama Papers and the other laundering/tax evasion scandals....
- colesantiago 4y ago
  The UK hasn’t got any memorable tech company that is on the world stage that the public knows. The only ones are Dyson and perhaps ARM which are the long lasting ones the UK has made. Monzo, Wise, Starling and Deliveroo are the latest 2010 cohort the UK has made and that’s about it. The latter cohort may die out or get acquired by FAANG or run out of money and shut down. Compared to the US, the UK keeps selling their companies abroad rather than acquiring them. The US keeps creating more and more successful tech companies. Once ARM chose to IPO in the US I knew it was completely over. Even the LSE is part owned by the US (Microsoft), the UK is slowly giving away their technological sovereignty, not exactly the tech world leaders they keep saying they are. It is a real shame.
  - didntreadarticl 4y ago
    The UK hasn’t got any memorable tech company that is on the world stage that the public knows. Yes thats a good way of putting it
  - rowanajmarshall 4y ago
    The UK isn't doing that on purpose, it's a natural evolution of not having super-firms like Google and Amazon that have the capital and size to acquire and grow domestic companies. Which itself is an evolution of not having a domestic market the size of Chna or the US (the only two countries with a bigger tech sector than the UK).
- Delphiza 4y ago
  A few high-tech companies that make really important things that consumers never hear about. * Renishaw. Precision measurement and manufacturing. * Spectris. Scientific instruments. Precision components. * Oxford Instruments. All sorts of high-tech stuff used in science and research Rolls Royce aerospace is pretty cool. There are some defence related companies that do tech stuff. Radar, guidance systems, battlefield comms, that sort of thing. Formula One tech is mostly British. MclLaren, Red Bull Racing, Mercedes are all UK based.
  - didntreadarticl 4y ago
    Thats interesting. So like engineering basically
- harel 4y ago
  I am British, but I wasn't born and raised in the UK. I am always amazed at how low UK born Brits's opinion of the UK is. It's always this defeatist attitude. Life in the UK is not without it's problems, that is for sure. But it's still an order of magnitude better than many other places and a lot of what is taken for granted here is not even dreamed of elsewhere. I guess appreciation requires perspective...
  - didntreadarticl 4y ago
    Thats kindof why I asked. I tried to think of UK equivalent to FAANG and couldn't come up with much. But there's lots of interesting responses to my comment, and an idea that kept coming through is that the UK is good at creating new companies but can't grow them beyond a certain point so they get acquired
    - harel 4y ago
      FAANG are a bit of a global entity at this stage. Also, all those British enterprises that are now owned by funds across the globe - that does not change the fact that the hands and brains working in those companies are hands and brains in the UK. And those hands can belong to many nationalities as well, but the core of the companies are here. Sorry if I sounded a bit snarky - I hear this a lot and I'm a bit sensitive to the British self deprecation. I've lived in three western advanced countries, and with all honesty I think we are more than OK here. We can do better, for sure, especially in these crazy times. But we are still having a better time at it than most.
  - moremetadata 4y ago
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chrisjc 4y ago
Can anyone recommend a decent video documentary (I don't read so good) on the early British computer/electronics era? I really find it fascinating how they had their own little market, industry and culture/ecosystem that seems to have spawned many modern companies like ARM, Raspberry Pi, etc, despite the overwhelming dominance of US and international heavyweights that captured most of the related markets during the 2000-2010s.
- noneeeed 4y ago
  Not a documentary but Micro Men, it was a one-off BBC drama about that era.
  - chrisjc 4y ago
    Nice! Gonna watch it later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM
    - dcminter 4y ago
      I don't have links to hand, but there are some really good long interviews with Chris Curry (of Sinclair and then Acorn) and the immensely charming Hermann Hauser (of Acorn) via one of the computer museums recounting much the same history. They should be kicking around on YouTube. Well worth watching if you enjoy Micro Men.
      - timthorn 4y ago
        The Centre for Computing History (which provided props and extras for the film) recorded Chris Curry, Steve Furber and Hermann Hauser watching Micro Men for the 10Y anniversary: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/news/55409/Micro-Men-10th-Anniversary/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/news/55409/Micro-Men-10th...
- bishopsmother 4y ago
  UK: Ruthless: The Story of Amstrad and Alan Sugar in the 80's and 90's: https://youtube.com/watch?v=eiIXn9Tr5hI https://youtube.com/watch?v=eiIXn9Tr5hI The REAL Sir Clive Sinclair: Portable TV's, Black Watches and C5's, Oh my!: https://youtube.com/watch?v=c1tWYN4dthw https://youtube.com/watch?v=c1tWYN4dthw The Rise and Fall of Peter Molyneux (All Parts): https://youtube.com/watch?v=zFZ92jySWe0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=zFZ92jySWe0 US: The Jack Tramiel Trilogy: From Commodore to Atari: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cIYcd2aSwps https://youtube.com/watch?v=cIYcd2aSwps
mark_undoio 4y ago
I have a real affection for the Em@iler (or, as my friend used to call it, the "Ematiler"). My parents got one around when I went to university. It was a really good fit for them and helped us keep in touch. Main benefits: * It did its job - a light showed up when you had something to read, otherwise you don't. * Always-on, no boot time. * It fit on the kitchen worktop, whereas PCs took up a lot of space. * The predictable schedule of dialing up, retrieving e-mail and then disconnecting let them know what their costs would be, even if they were a bit higher than the (variable) costs of normal PC internet use. * It had good contacts storage (with dockable electronic address book you could take away), at a time when you would still expect to be managing a list of telephone numbers on a piece of paper. All for less than a PC. They could have got all the same things out of the PC, the Em@iler just put it in more convenient package.
vidarh 4y ago
It's quite strange to have an article going into this much detail about the Emailer without comparing and constrasting it to Minitel and Prestel.
- shbshb 4y ago
  Or for that matter the ICL Open Per Desk (OPD) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Per_Desk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Per_Desk
beschizza 4y ago
> "Most tellingly, the monitor was extremely basic (technical name: a pixel VDU) which ran on BASIC 1.0; a programming language that quite amazingly, was already 20 years old (having been first created at Dartmouth College in 1964)." As fun as it is, this article exemplifies the trend of people writing snarkily about subjects they know little about. This sentence alone has at least four factual errors in it! - The monitor was not "tellingly" basic and it isn't remarkable that it was a "pixel VDU". The author is perhaps mangling a remark from Chris Hall in an old Register article making clear for modern readers that it was just a CRT in a box. - The monitor (!) did not run Basic. - The Amstrad's Basic was Locomotive Basic, a relatively advanced and powerful dialect, not "Basic 1.0" - Basic was created in 1963. It was published in 1964.
- Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
  Very much this. There's lots in here about the 8-bit era which is just plain wrong. The CPC was absolutely not an "impulse buy price point". It was several times the price of a ZX Spectrum, which was a much more "compromised" device than the CPC. Amstrad's marketing trick was to sell an all-in-one, non-toy system at an affordable price that didn't tie up the TV. Put simply, the CPC appealed to the parents who were paying for the computer, not the kids who were badgering for it. When he says "many devices still required purchasers to undertake their own wiring, and sometimes even solder on their own plug", that's not at all the case. The kit computer in the UK died years earlier with the ZX81. Fitting plugs yourself was not uncommon in the 80s, but no soldering was required.
  - goldcd 4y ago
    Came here to say the same about the CPC price. All manner of fascinating stuff in Amstrad history. e.g. the 3" disc drive (not 3.5") Seemingly he found a cheap supply - so we got them on the spectrum, CPC and the PCW. A PCW was what my father brought home from a computer fair, instead of the anticipated Amiga or PC. Even more integrated than the CPC with computer & drives built into the monitor and shipping with a printer. A predecessor of the iMac (made in a hell-dimension)
rwmj 4y ago
He's very wrong about the CPC. Technically the software and hardware was very capable, and it had something resembling a "proper" operating system (as much as that was possible on 8 bit machines). Later on they even licensed CP/M. That may be because Amstrad outsourced the software to a different company[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Software
TheRealNGenius 4y ago
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wombatfodder 4y ago
For all of the Em@iler being disastrous, Amstrad also almost made an internet TV box (functionally similar to the Bush one) in a single-box format like '80s computers. Rumour was that it got right up to release-ready and then AMS said it was crap, so it was just binned.
pacaro 4y ago
Ha! I worked on this at a small company called STNC, who were acquired by Microsoft in July 1999. We provided the software. Random recollections. The codename at Atari was BSI which IIRC stood for Bob's Stupid Idea The screen was a disaster. There was a mismatch between the lcd and it's controller, so it could only be persuaded to provide three distinguishable shades. I had to bastardize our Floyd Steinberg ditherer into working with this. There was a production crunch deadline which lead to them being shipped from manufacturing (in China?) with a bad image. Every box then had to be opened and every device reflashed (no OTA updates back then) I'll see if anyone else has any good recollections...
- billpg 4y ago
  Hiya! I worked there in '97, first year at Bury St Edmunds.
  - pacaro 4y ago
    In hindsight we worked on some very cool and very crazy things. The emailer (of course), the brother geobook (the first thing I worked on was an ill-fated color port), web libraries for the psion5 browser (a whole different tail of woe), a standards compliant (i.e. not wap, or proprietary transcoding) web browser on a cell phone demo in early 98 (that was mainly Dave and Chris?)
    - billpg 4y ago
      You had the perils of writing C for GEOS? Having to lock a block of memory before using it and then unlocking it when you've done. Looking back, my big regret was not trying harder to get C++ working. Having the compiler automatically insert unlock calls via a destructor function would have saved me a lot of time and screaming "Why are you still locked?" at the screen.
- pacaro 4y ago
  Apparently we did have OTA updates, but I definitely recall that the first batch all had to be reflashed, so the version on the hardware must have had a fairly critical bug. The article mentions that people would buy the emailer and not use the email capability. It was a decent phone in it's own right with built in voicemail (at the time a lot of people still had tape based voicemail "ansaphone™") which displayed missed calls and voicemails on the screen We may have been the first product to show an integrated inbox between phone and email, although again my memory is fuzzy
ItsABytecode 4y ago
I do love telling users to RTFM as soon as they open the box. In some way I'd prefer that to today's "What manual? You don't need a manual"
- mark_undoio 4y ago
  Yes, I didn't exactly think it was bad! It's a bit forceful but it tells you clearly exactly what you need to do to have a good experience. Given the setup was presumably a bit fiddly this seems much better than having customers get frustrated before resorting to the manual.

43 points by atombender 4y ago

KuiN 4y ago

My favourite thing about the Emailer is it was often stylised E-m@iler, which is the most incredibly 2000s branding.

You can just about see one in an early episode of The Apprentice here: https://youtu.be/5xwW0TWO9nY?t=3345 https://youtu.be/5xwW0TWO9nY?t=3345 . Anyone know when they ditched the emailer from The Apprentice?

whywhywhywhy 4y ago
Glad I'm not the only one that remembers this cameo, it was there way longer than it should have been IIRC.
pomatic 4y ago
It was featured on The Apprentice right up until it was discontinued, but I don't actually know when that was off hand.

didntreadarticl 4y ago

The UK had Amstrad, Sinclair, Acorn (which sortof became Arm) What have we got now? When I look up the UKs biggest tech companies now its people like Aveva and Sage who make dull enterprisey software. Is there anyone else? edit: I guess we might still have some big game studios? edit: I'll also take websites, has the UK got any big website companies? Seems like our biggest are Rightmove and Autotrader

agd 4y ago
There are lots of tech companies (e.g. Fintech, games etc) however not much hard tech. Like the rest of Europe, we're completely reliant on the US/Asia for cutting edge chips and phones.
- didntreadarticl 4y ago
  tell me about the big fintech and games ones
  - michaelt 4y ago
    If you look at, for example, the UK entries in [1] you'll find many of them are doing loans, payments, insurance and blockchain stuff. (Admittedly, that list is using a definition of 'startup' broad enough to include the UK's second-largest energy supply company) [1] https://sifted.eu/rankings/european-unicorn-startups https://sifted.eu/rankings/european-unicorn-startups
RobotToaster 4y ago
ARM I guess?
- didntreadarticl 4y ago
  Still in Cambridge but owned by Japans SoftBank Group. Does that count? When I look up 'UKs biggest tech companies' ARM doesnt get a mention.
chrisjc 4y ago
I've probably posted it several times now, but there's a great acquired podcast about ARM. https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/arm-softbank https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/arm-softbank
mark_undoio 4y ago
I don't think there are many big UK computer companies that haven't been absorbed by something else. There was Microfocus: https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/home https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/home They owned SuSE at one time. But MicroFocus now have owners outside the UK. And there was Autonomy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Autonomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Autonomy Bought by HP, leading to lots of controversy and legal wrangling when they did get what they had expected.
- masfuerte 4y ago
  Many Autonomy people went to Darktrace. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darktrace https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darktrace
- stevekemp 4y ago
  Microfocus is a name I've not heard in a good few years - the last time I heard of them was for their COBOL compilers, on SCO Unixware.
  - mark_undoio 4y ago
    They're still making COBOL compilers, as far as I know - targeting Linux and with some modern style Dev tools too. I guess it's a migration path for people getting rid of big iron but unable or uninterested in getting rid of the code they ran.
rowanajmarshall 4y ago
> I guess we might still have some big game studios? We've got Creative Assembly (owned by Japan-based Sega), Rockstar North (previously DMA Design and founded the GTA series, now owned by US-based Rockstar ofc), Jagex (owned by a US PE company), and a whole host of others mostly now owned by US companies. There's a piece of wisdom floating around that the UK is actually really good at building tech and tech-adjacent companies, bu really bad at scaling them beyond a certain point. We don't have the BigTech companies China and the US do (nobody does, really), but we're a pretty open economy that American firms are comfortable doing business with, so lots of promising companies get acquired before they hit _big_.
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  Yes there's a lot of firms that are actually in some senses UK companies from a tech perspective, but are owned by Americans. I used to work for one. All the engineering work was done out of the UK. The US focused on sales. Funnily enough, when we started working together I was getting drinks with the CEO and I mentioned I seemed to have spent my whole life working for Americans. He laughed and said he'd spent his whole life working for Brits (his background was finance).
- maxbaines 4y ago
  Good piece of wisdom, I had not thought about it but I think you make a valid point, it applies to other industries too. Not sure there is anything wrong with the approach, I would rather be innovating than maintaining.
mark_undoio 4y ago
Oh and, also: Raspberry Pi https://www.raspberrypi.org/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/ Definitely deserves a mention as it at least has quite big mind share. And Frontier: https://www.frontier.co.uk/ https://www.frontier.co.uk/ Who develop various games including, possibly most famously in these circles, Elite Dangerous.
vidarh 4y ago
> What have we got now? Graphcore. Semiconductor company doing accelerators for machine learning, based in Bristol. Raised $200m at a $1.7bn valuation in 2018. EDIT2: There's also XMOS in Bristol, which has taken about $100m in funding over the years, but have no idea what their valuation is like. Also (fabless) semiconductor company that seems to have sort-of pivoted towards AI acceleration similar to Graphcore. > edit: I'll also take websites, has the UK got any big website companies? Seems like our biggest are Rightmove and Autotrader Hopin (virtual events; raised about $1bn) Cazoo (online car sales; about 2k employees) Deliveroo (food delivery; market cap of about 1.6bn) Snyk is now apparently Boston based, but was founded in London (cybersecurity); this is a common issue for the European startup space, but perhaps especially so for the UK since startups here tends to target English-speaking markets from the start, in that the incentive to move the companies to the US are pretty significant. Revolut, sort of. Bank license in Lithuania, founders are Russian and Ukrainian, but headquartered in London. EDIT: Babylon Health. "Online first" healthcare provider offering both NHS and private GP services via app/video as the first instance (with offline facilities to complement with face to face examinations when needed). About 2k employees; took about $550m funding at a $2bn valuation in 2019
- coding_unit_1 4y ago
  Starling Bank would be a better example than Revolut.
- samstave 4y ago
  How can you say money laundering for the Eastern Bloc Mafia without saying you're doing money laundering for the Eastern Bloc Mafia ; "Revolut, sort of. Bank license in Lithuania, founders are Russian and Ukrainian, but headquartered in London." - On a serious note: can we determine if any of the Ukranian AIDE went into / through this 'bank'? The City Of London is the money laundering capital - with all their insturments pointing to the companies/countries of the Panama Papers and the other laundering/tax evasion scandals....
colesantiago 4y ago
The UK hasn’t got any memorable tech company that is on the world stage that the public knows. The only ones are Dyson and perhaps ARM which are the long lasting ones the UK has made. Monzo, Wise, Starling and Deliveroo are the latest 2010 cohort the UK has made and that’s about it. The latter cohort may die out or get acquired by FAANG or run out of money and shut down. Compared to the US, the UK keeps selling their companies abroad rather than acquiring them. The US keeps creating more and more successful tech companies. Once ARM chose to IPO in the US I knew it was completely over. Even the LSE is part owned by the US (Microsoft), the UK is slowly giving away their technological sovereignty, not exactly the tech world leaders they keep saying they are. It is a real shame.
- didntreadarticl 4y ago
  The UK hasn’t got any memorable tech company that is on the world stage that the public knows. Yes thats a good way of putting it
- rowanajmarshall 4y ago
  The UK isn't doing that on purpose, it's a natural evolution of not having super-firms like Google and Amazon that have the capital and size to acquire and grow domestic companies. Which itself is an evolution of not having a domestic market the size of Chna or the US (the only two countries with a bigger tech sector than the UK).
Delphiza 4y ago
A few high-tech companies that make really important things that consumers never hear about. * Renishaw. Precision measurement and manufacturing. * Spectris. Scientific instruments. Precision components. * Oxford Instruments. All sorts of high-tech stuff used in science and research Rolls Royce aerospace is pretty cool. There are some defence related companies that do tech stuff. Radar, guidance systems, battlefield comms, that sort of thing. Formula One tech is mostly British. MclLaren, Red Bull Racing, Mercedes are all UK based.
- didntreadarticl 4y ago
  Thats interesting. So like engineering basically
harel 4y ago
I am British, but I wasn't born and raised in the UK. I am always amazed at how low UK born Brits's opinion of the UK is. It's always this defeatist attitude. Life in the UK is not without it's problems, that is for sure. But it's still an order of magnitude better than many other places and a lot of what is taken for granted here is not even dreamed of elsewhere. I guess appreciation requires perspective...
- didntreadarticl 4y ago
  Thats kindof why I asked. I tried to think of UK equivalent to FAANG and couldn't come up with much. But there's lots of interesting responses to my comment, and an idea that kept coming through is that the UK is good at creating new companies but can't grow them beyond a certain point so they get acquired
  - harel 4y ago
    FAANG are a bit of a global entity at this stage. Also, all those British enterprises that are now owned by funds across the globe - that does not change the fact that the hands and brains working in those companies are hands and brains in the UK. And those hands can belong to many nationalities as well, but the core of the companies are here. Sorry if I sounded a bit snarky - I hear this a lot and I'm a bit sensitive to the British self deprecation. I've lived in three western advanced countries, and with all honesty I think we are more than OK here. We can do better, for sure, especially in these crazy times. But we are still having a better time at it than most.
- moremetadata 4y ago
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chrisjc 4y ago

Can anyone recommend a decent video documentary (I don't read so good) on the early British computer/electronics era? I really find it fascinating how they had their own little market, industry and culture/ecosystem that seems to have spawned many modern companies like ARM, Raspberry Pi, etc, despite the overwhelming dominance of US and international heavyweights that captured most of the related markets during the 2000-2010s.

noneeeed 4y ago
Not a documentary but Micro Men, it was a one-off BBC drama about that era.
- chrisjc 4y ago
  Nice! Gonna watch it later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM
  - dcminter 4y ago
    I don't have links to hand, but there are some really good long interviews with Chris Curry (of Sinclair and then Acorn) and the immensely charming Hermann Hauser (of Acorn) via one of the computer museums recounting much the same history. They should be kicking around on YouTube. Well worth watching if you enjoy Micro Men.
    - timthorn 4y ago
      The Centre for Computing History (which provided props and extras for the film) recorded Chris Curry, Steve Furber and Hermann Hauser watching Micro Men for the 10Y anniversary: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/news/55409/Micro-Men-10th-Anniversary/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/news/55409/Micro-Men-10th...
bishopsmother 4y ago
UK: Ruthless: The Story of Amstrad and Alan Sugar in the 80's and 90's: https://youtube.com/watch?v=eiIXn9Tr5hI https://youtube.com/watch?v=eiIXn9Tr5hI The REAL Sir Clive Sinclair: Portable TV's, Black Watches and C5's, Oh my!: https://youtube.com/watch?v=c1tWYN4dthw https://youtube.com/watch?v=c1tWYN4dthw The Rise and Fall of Peter Molyneux (All Parts): https://youtube.com/watch?v=zFZ92jySWe0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=zFZ92jySWe0 US: The Jack Tramiel Trilogy: From Commodore to Atari: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cIYcd2aSwps https://youtube.com/watch?v=cIYcd2aSwps

mark_undoio 4y ago

I have a real affection for the Em@iler (or, as my friend used to call it, the "Ematiler"). My parents got one around when I went to university. It was a really good fit for them and helped us keep in touch. Main benefits: * It did its job - a light showed up when you had something to read, otherwise you don't. * Always-on, no boot time. * It fit on the kitchen worktop, whereas PCs took up a lot of space. * The predictable schedule of dialing up, retrieving e-mail and then disconnecting let them know what their costs would be, even if they were a bit higher than the (variable) costs of normal PC internet use. * It had good contacts storage (with dockable electronic address book you could take away), at a time when you would still expect to be managing a list of telephone numbers on a piece of paper. All for less than a PC. They could have got all the same things out of the PC, the Em@iler just put it in more convenient package.

vidarh 4y ago

It's quite strange to have an article going into this much detail about the Emailer without comparing and constrasting it to Minitel and Prestel.

shbshb 4y ago
Or for that matter the ICL Open Per Desk (OPD) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Per_Desk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Per_Desk

beschizza 4y ago

> "Most tellingly, the monitor was extremely basic (technical name: a pixel VDU) which ran on BASIC 1.0; a programming language that quite amazingly, was already 20 years old (having been first created at Dartmouth College in 1964)." As fun as it is, this article exemplifies the trend of people writing snarkily about subjects they know little about. This sentence alone has at least four factual errors in it! - The monitor was not "tellingly" basic and it isn't remarkable that it was a "pixel VDU". The author is perhaps mangling a remark from Chris Hall in an old Register article making clear for modern readers that it was just a CRT in a box. - The monitor (!) did not run Basic. - The Amstrad's Basic was Locomotive Basic, a relatively advanced and powerful dialect, not "Basic 1.0" - Basic was created in 1963. It was published in 1964.

Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
Very much this. There's lots in here about the 8-bit era which is just plain wrong. The CPC was absolutely not an "impulse buy price point". It was several times the price of a ZX Spectrum, which was a much more "compromised" device than the CPC. Amstrad's marketing trick was to sell an all-in-one, non-toy system at an affordable price that didn't tie up the TV. Put simply, the CPC appealed to the parents who were paying for the computer, not the kids who were badgering for it. When he says "many devices still required purchasers to undertake their own wiring, and sometimes even solder on their own plug", that's not at all the case. The kit computer in the UK died years earlier with the ZX81. Fitting plugs yourself was not uncommon in the 80s, but no soldering was required.
- goldcd 4y ago
  Came here to say the same about the CPC price. All manner of fascinating stuff in Amstrad history. e.g. the 3" disc drive (not 3.5") Seemingly he found a cheap supply - so we got them on the spectrum, CPC and the PCW. A PCW was what my father brought home from a computer fair, instead of the anticipated Amiga or PC. Even more integrated than the CPC with computer & drives built into the monitor and shipping with a printer. A predecessor of the iMac (made in a hell-dimension)

rwmj 4y ago

He's very wrong about the CPC. Technically the software and hardware was very capable, and it had something resembling a "proper" operating system (as much as that was possible on 8 bit machines). Later on they even licensed CP/M. That may be because Amstrad outsourced the software to a different company[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Software

TheRealNGenius 4y ago

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wombatfodder 4y ago

For all of the Em@iler being disastrous, Amstrad also almost made an internet TV box (functionally similar to the Bush one) in a single-box format like '80s computers. Rumour was that it got right up to release-ready and then AMS said it was crap, so it was just binned.

pacaro 4y ago

Ha! I worked on this at a small company called STNC, who were acquired by Microsoft in July 1999. We provided the software. Random recollections. The codename at Atari was BSI which IIRC stood for Bob's Stupid Idea The screen was a disaster. There was a mismatch between the lcd and it's controller, so it could only be persuaded to provide three distinguishable shades. I had to bastardize our Floyd Steinberg ditherer into working with this. There was a production crunch deadline which lead to them being shipped from manufacturing (in China?) with a bad image. Every box then had to be opened and every device reflashed (no OTA updates back then) I'll see if anyone else has any good recollections...

billpg 4y ago
Hiya! I worked there in '97, first year at Bury St Edmunds.
- pacaro 4y ago
  In hindsight we worked on some very cool and very crazy things. The emailer (of course), the brother geobook (the first thing I worked on was an ill-fated color port), web libraries for the psion5 browser (a whole different tail of woe), a standards compliant (i.e. not wap, or proprietary transcoding) web browser on a cell phone demo in early 98 (that was mainly Dave and Chris?)
  - billpg 4y ago
    You had the perils of writing C for GEOS? Having to lock a block of memory before using it and then unlocking it when you've done. Looking back, my big regret was not trying harder to get C++ working. Having the compiler automatically insert unlock calls via a destructor function would have saved me a lot of time and screaming "Why are you still locked?" at the screen.
pacaro 4y ago
Apparently we did have OTA updates, but I definitely recall that the first batch all had to be reflashed, so the version on the hardware must have had a fairly critical bug. The article mentions that people would buy the emailer and not use the email capability. It was a decent phone in it's own right with built in voicemail (at the time a lot of people still had tape based voicemail "ansaphone™") which displayed missed calls and voicemails on the screen We may have been the first product to show an integrated inbox between phone and email, although again my memory is fuzzy

ItsABytecode 4y ago

I do love telling users to RTFM as soon as they open the box. In some way I'd prefer that to today's "What manual? You don't need a manual"

mark_undoio 4y ago
Yes, I didn't exactly think it was bad! It's a bit forceful but it tells you clearly exactly what you need to do to have a good experience. Given the setup was presumably a bit fiddly this seems much better than having customers get frustrated before resorting to the manual.