Palmtop computers

It would be tempting to think of smartphones and tablets as recent inventions, but in fact portable computing began in 1989, thanks to a British computer company. Distributed Information Processing (DIP) created the Pocket PC – a tiny computer powered by AA batteries, complete with a keyboard. This carry-everywhere computer attracted the attention of Atari, which released the product as the Portfolio, the world’s first palmtop. Fact fans should note that it’s the Portfolio John Conner uses to hack the ATM machine in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. From the initial days of the palmtop computer came the first PDAs, and this in turn lead to the development of the ubiquitous smartphone.

The digital audio player

It’s hard to imagine a world without digital music players, but it was a British inventor that got there first. In 1979, Kane Kramer came up with the idea of a digital audio player known as the IXI. This player was the size of a credit card with a small mono LCD screen and navigation and control buttons. It was designed to use bubble memory, although its 8MB capacity was capable of storing only around three-and-a-half minutes of audio. However, Kramer correctly postulated that storage capacities would massively increase. In addition to the player, Kramer also proposed a digital download service over telephone lines to let people get the music they wanted, when they wanted it. A patent was awarded in 1985 in the UK and 1987 in the US. Sadly, the product wasn’t to be a success. After failing to raise £60,000 to renew the patent, the design entered the public domain, and other companies were free to do their own thing. In 2008, Apple called Kramer as a witness to defend itself against charges of patent infringement for the iPod, citing the IXI as prior art.

The World Wide Web

Although the internet – an interconnected network of computers – came out of the US military, the graphical World Wide Web, which we access through our web browsers, was created by English scientist and inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Working at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 1980, he built a system called ENQUIRE, which was a personal database of people and software models. Each page in ENQUIRE was linked to another page via hypertext. In 1984, he wrote a proposal for “a large hypertext database with typed links”, which generated little interest. Undeterred, he came up with the World Wide Web, developing HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), HyperText Markup Language (HTML) the first web browser, the first web server and web server software, and the first web pages. On 6th August 1991, he posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project online, and the web was officially made public. The rest, as they say, is history.

ARM

British IT company ARM Holdings plc is a Cambridge-based company that designs the processors used in the majority of mobile phones and tablets. It’s so important, even Microsoft is writing a version of Windows 8 that will run on ARM architecture. What’s particularly clever about the company is that it doesn’t manufacture processors but licenses its intellectual property to other companies such as Intel, Samsung, Nvidia, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, which build their own CPUs. ARM CPUs are also noted for their low power consumption. Given the ever-growing number of smartphone and tablet computers, this feature is crucial, and one that should see ARM Holdings plc grow even more. The company started life as Acorn Computers Ltd, which manufactured the popular BBC Micro and the Archimedes range of computers. Just as it helped to kick-start the home computer revolution, so it continues to drive innovation and new products, making it the most important British computer company in operation today.

Raspberry Pi

The downside of computers becoming easier to use in recent years is that kids are no longer exposed to programming as they were in the early days of computing. Education has moved away from teaching kids how to program and towards teaching them how to use applications such as Excel. The result is that the UK isn’t providing the IT industry with the skills it desperately needs, which is where the Raspberry Pi Foundation steps in. The goal of this foundation, which was set up by Eben Upton and colleagues at the University of Cambridge’s computer laboratory, was to create a low-cost computer that would boot into a programming environment. The Raspberry Pi was born, and is now available for just £32 including VAT. Based around a mobile processor, this cheap computer boots from an SD card into a Linux operating system that kids (and anyone, really) can use to learn how to program.

The resurgence of Apple

As hard as it is to believe now, Apple was once a company in massive financial trouble. The turnaround of the company is largely down to Steve Jobs, of course, and one of his key decisions was to make design a key part of all new products. He wanted to make products that weren’t only functional, as were the beige PCs of the time, but also beautiful and, ultimately, desirable. For Jobs to make this happen, he needed a designer of considerable talent. Jonathan Ive, who was born in Chingford, London, has been the conceptual mind behind most of Apple’s iconic products, including the iMac, the MacBook Air, the iPod, the iPod Touch, the iPhone and the iPad. Just one of these products would be an impressive achievement on any designer’s CV; to do them all is incredible.

The early home computer market

It took until the early 1980s for computers to be ready for mass-market home use, but the UK grabbed the opportunity by the horns. In a short period of time, we saw the launch of the BBC Micro, the ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC 464, all of which were massively popular in their own right. These computers saw limited success outside of the UK, with the US favouring its own brands, but the impact these computers made cannot be denied. As well as giving UK consumers their very first taste of home computing, they also gave many people their first platform on which to program, paving the way for significant successes in a broad range of technological fields.