nev young wrote:
Stuart Brady wrote:
It seems to me that Sir Clive would never have been hugely worried
about maintaining a strong position within the market in the long
term... of course, that's not to say that he wouldn't have appreciated
having a 'cash cow' to fund his other project...
Then he should have put a 68020 and a proper floppy disk in the QL :-)
I was thinking more along the lines of the UK having a manufacturing
base. If, instead of many small fragmented companies all setting up
their own manufacturing plant, there had been larger companies who
could have outsourced the build to UK manufactures then it is just
possible that the UK would have become what Taiwan is now. Even Bruce
and Alan had to set up their own plant to build Sam using venture
capital. How would things have panned out if they could have just had
the build done by an existing UK company, who was already tooled up to
build computers. They wouldn't have needed as much capital and it
might not have been clawed back quite so quickly. Even Amstrad might
have built their machines here rather than in Japan.
It seems to me that successive governments since Thatcher have
deliberately tried to remove any manufacturing capability from the UK.
My belief is the action in the 70s and early 80s by the unions sealed
the death knell of British industry; foreign investors were terrified of
getting involved with a workshy, bolshy and self-serving union-driven
workforce and the government was tired of sitting in the middle policing
the morons at their picket lines.
Now of course we have the CWU, the largest union (of course, since all
the manufacturing unions are effectively extinct) holding the whole
country to ransom, but that's a different story.
To get back to the subject, I don't think the Sinclair:Acorn thing was
what caused the PC to win; the 16-bits carried on the line for the home
computers but by the early 90s everyone knew the PC was going to be a
juggernaut; certainly once Windows started selling with PCs that could
run it well (ie decent speed 386s) the micro was dead.
Geoff
