Ivor Catt, 4.12.2018 1

How Britain threw away the chance to be incredibly rich.

Traditionally, Britain got ahead of the pack through technical innovation, not money laundering.

Now PPE control is more important. https://www.ppe.ox.ac.uk/

In today’s very similar situation over electromagnetic theory, my co-author Dave thinks I (or we) should not use these very successful tactics. After this vicious attack on the government, (see below), the government spent £50,000, equivalent to £300,000 today, funding research into “Catt spiral” CS in two universities and also research by his business colleague Ken Wood in R.S.R.E. Malvern. I knew that you don’t get a man to do what he is paid to do by being polite. I had already tried that. (The 30 year window of opportunity for CS ended when the memory and processing technologies diverged again. The delays in exploiting CS went on so long it lost the boat. But I got the money.)

This fumbling mess everywhere else led to Bill Gates on the west coast now taking over the world. Ivor Catt 3.5.2021

http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x5cz2.htm

pp 47 and 31 https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Wireless-World/80s/Wireless-World-1982-12.pdf

http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/new%20bureaucracy.htm

“Spectator March 2, 1974, p 275

Computers

The fettered giant

Ivor Catt

During the last four weeks I have written a series of articles discussing the chaotic state of a high technology industry, and the feeble government departments associated with such industries. ….”

Spectator February 16, 1974, p 211-212

Computers

HMG and the CAM

“ . . . The history of Tracked Hovercraft Limited proved to be an example of the Government's failure to manage their research and development in a competent manner. It also showed up weaknesses in the system for developing and exploiting inventions."

(From the Third Report from the Select Committee on Science and Technology, Tracked Hovercraft Ltd. HMSO 361p)

The CAM invention further illuminated weaknesses in the system for developing and exploiting inventions, or to put it more accurately, the ingenious nature of the system for sabotaging new invention and industry. Certain important principles became clear during the first eighteen lingering months when the CAM invention was enveloped in the labyrinthine entrails of Her Majesty's Government.”

In 1962 I said that within 15 years digital electronics would produce 10% of GDP. It took 50 years, but not in the UK, but on the west coast of the US, where the blocking of hi tec (only some of it discussed below) was not too pronounced.

In Britain the people approved of blocking hi tec on the grounds that it would cause unemployment. Nobody seemed to worry about our blocking it and foreign hi tec then creating unemployment in Britain.

The only place where the necessary components were in place was the west coast of the USA, but even there the whole process was so badly conducted, as discussed in my book “Computer Worship”, that it took 50 years rather than 15.

And now the only thing the British can think about is taxing the wealth generated elsewhere.

In 1962 we were level with the US in digital electronics. Only hostility from all sources, including the public controlled by Oxford PPE and history graduates, could hold back the potential. They feared loss of political control if technocrats were allowed to take part in decision making. Technical competence was a bar to political positions, so all the decisions were bad.

In 1962 we technocrats saw the enormous profit potential in a world market for digital hospital equipment, but instead the government only paid us to develop weapons, which did not work anyway. Look at all the foreign electronic equipment in our hospitals today! This was obviously going to happen if technocrats were kept out of the political class. http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/gamoe.htm . Failed weapons projects were a useful way to discredit the technocracy and keep them from power. Once I could work for the government on an aid to the blind at half the salary I would get from the same government to stay in the weapons industry (the late GEC) for double the salary. With a wife and of our kids to feed, I carried on designing weapons. To salve my conscience, I took the problem of phoney weapons (which would not end up killing Russians anyway) up through the political process. The PPE politicians were not interested. http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/gamoe.htm

Ivor Catt 3.12.2018

The Spectator February 2, 1974

The Spectator, 02Feb1974, p140-142

Computers

The great con game

Ivor Catt

The computer industry is the biggest money loser in history. General Electric lost around $1,000,000,000 before giving up its computer manufacturing operation. Buyers of computers have also suffered heavily. TWA sued Burroughs for $70,000,000 damages after buying their equipment.

The people in the industry have little idea how dishonest they are being, because even within the industry there is widespread ignorance about computers and their use. People in the industry take a pride in being ignorant about computers, and at computer conferences and in text books they are encouraged to remain so. Computer salesmen sell £100,000 machines, about which they are more or less ignorant, to customers who are even more ignorant. The customer buys a computer as a prestige symbol even though he may think he is buying it for its use, and when it fails to do the job he keeps quiet about its failure so as to keep the prestige.

When an irate customer complains to you, the manufacturer, about the rotten machine you have delivered (or should I say partly delivered, as is more often the case), you have to keep him guessing for a year, until the guarantee runs out. The first, almost routine, step is to tell him you have serious doubts about the programming team he has put to work on the machine, but you will be very willing to help by giving them some training, on his premises or yours.

When the two sets of programmers meet for the training ceremony, they can be relied on to fight (programmers are the cowboys of this age, used to shooting from the hip), and neither you nor your customer will be able to see much through the dust for six months or more. Finally a sort of compromise, or truce, comes, and either some of your programmers or some of your customers' are fired as scapegoats. The programming is restarted, and after a further four months or so attention begins to move from the programming problems ("Surely all three programming teams couldn't have been incompetent!") to the hardware, which was a mess from the start.

A wise computer manufacturer will have forestalled this attack by dropping the odd query about the servicing engineers, offering training and so on. Servicing engineers are cowboys too, but of a more physical kind. On a trip back from a sick computer in Durham with one of them, we averaged 70 mph for the first hour, 80 mph for the next, and 90 mph for the last hour, in a Cortina. We also tailgated a police car! The Durham computer was still sick, and I was in bad shape that evening. I haven't been, back up there.

It has been noted that each computer servicing engineer seems to have a signature fault, finding the same fault on any machine he visits. This backbiting between servicing engineers, and

Between engineers and programmers, lasts well beyond the remaining months of the guarantee. Has anyone dared suggest that the computer itself is at fault? (Blasphemy!)

The trouble is that the use of computers is quite different from the use of socks or cardboard boxes; no one in the top echelons of company power, enmeshed in petty realpolitik, has a proper grasp of the complexities of the computer horrogog they have brought into their company.

The manufacturer of computers runs into the same problem. The energies of the top people are spent in what is called administration. No one in the industry is able to understand all the areas of difficulty in their design, and the experts in different fields such as semiconductor or logic design have vision only along their own tunnels of expertise.

It's a lie that computers don't go wrong, that only programmers and operators make mistakes. Read about the 'glitch.' It's difficult to do this, because of what I call Religious Science. Scientific journals will generally only publish favourable news about science. A fundamental barrier like the glitch is suppressed or laughed off, in the same way as the Greek Pythagoreans kept it secret when they couldn't work out the square root of two.

A number of serious problems in computers are hushed up, and the glitch is the most interesting of them, because when the computer goes wrong it leaves no indication of why it did. It just goes mad and you never find out why. Flanagan, editor of Scientific American, did publish something on the glitch in April, 1973, after six months of evasion, but he was clearly embarrassed about it and trivialised a very serious problem. This urge to 'joke off' problems with computers while extolling their alleged successes (which I find often crumble away on close scrutiny) runs through all the scientific literature, and shows the 'Wizard of Oz' or 'Emperor has no clothes' underpinnings of our contemporary computerised myths. Double think is pervasive in high technology. Talk to a computer scientist about a fundamental problem in computers and his eyes glaze over. You're not going to persuade a computer scientist that he has jumped on a loser instead of on to computers, science and technology is highly complex, some simplification of the subject is necessary when it is expounded to awed journalists, who add their editorial touch before they carry their message to the public. This is the way myth has developed in the computer industry. Journalists would get a surprise if they were to examine the world of the computercrats, a shoddy, dishonest world with many confidence tricksters. As one computer salesman said to me after selling (and taking money for) a non-existent computer, "Do you ever get to think you're part of a great big con game?"

Ivor Catt, a Cambridge engineer, has fifteen years' experience of the computer industry in Britain and the US. He left the industry to write and lecture, his second book Computer Worship being published this month by Pitman (£1.80). He has recently patented an invention which could reshape the computer of the future, and which has the financial support of three government departments. This is the first of a series of articles he is writing for The Spectator.

The Spectator, February 9, 1974 p.179

Computers

The CAM invention
Ivor Catt

On March 1, 1973, the National Research Development Corporation said that the CAM invention " ...could be of fundamental importance in the design, construction and operation of future digital processors and stores (i.e. computers)."

The dramatic collapse in the cost of computer circuitry due to the development of LSI (Large Scale Integration) was the most important development in the computer art. This should have had a profound effect on computer organisation but was ignored. Whereas in 1959 when I joined the computer industry the prime cost of a logic gate, the basic element in a computer, was £2.50, today we can manufacture some 300,000 interconnected logic gates on a semiconductor LSI wafer for a cost which is claimed to be £10 but is really probably more like £2.50. This means that the cost of a logic gate has fallen by a factor approaching a Million.

The reasons why the enormous potential resulting from this massive cost reduction has not been exploited are given in my book, Computer Worship.

The CAM invention takes advantage of the collapse almost to zero in the cost of circuitry and uses the processed two-inch wafer as it stands without the many further manufacturing stages which have always before been indulged in. A self-organising associative memory is generated on the wafer, and there is plenty of computing power on a £2.50 wafer (equivalent to 300 general purpose computers) for regions of the wafer to decide which adjacent regions are faulty and should be avoided. The associative memory so formed is then used to simulate conventional memory, undercutting the present cost of core and semiconductor memories on the market by a factor of 20.

Further technical information can be supplied by the company set up to exploit the invention, CAM, Crouch Hall, Redbourn, Hefts AL3 7EU.

Development of the CAM (Computer Associative Modules) invention can be expected to take the British computer industry ahead of the American. The first target for CAM is the conventional computer memory market. However, later developments will be much more important, enabling us to do tasks which are not achievable with conventional computers. These include: the sorting out of traffic jams; air traffic control; railway timetable and school timetable planning; airline reservation system improvement; town' planning; highway planning; electricity supply planning and control; pattern recognition.

NRDC paid for the patenting' of the CAM invention in three countries. ACTP, a branch of DTI, is committed to the financial support (on their usual terms, 50 per cent of money spent) of the £40,000 development project. SRC recently granted the Middlesex Polytechnic Microelectronics Centre £1,000 to research into one aspect of the CAM invention.

Spectator February 16, 1974, p 211-212

Computers

HMG and the CAM

Ivor Catt

" . . . The history of Tracked Hovercraft Limited proved to be an example of the Government's failure to manage their research and development in a competent manner. It also showed up weaknesses in the system for developing and exploiting inventions."

(From the Third Report from the Select Committee on Science and Technology, Tracked Hovercraft Ltd. HMSO 361p)

At first sight, it might appear that a government agency such as^. the NRDC (National Research Development Corporation), set up to support new invention and industry, has two possible courses of action when a proposal such as the CAM project is made to it:

1) Say the proposal is bad and reject it, or

2) Say the proposal is good and support it.

However, either of these courses carries a risk, either of supporting a bad proposal and wasting taxpayers' money, or of rejecting a good proposal and facing embarrassment should the idea later be developed abroad. Either could hazard the comfortable career paths of worthy functionaries within the NRDC, particularly those lacking the ability to distinguish between a good idea and a bad, or even between an idea and a gatepost.

This apparent Hobson's choice was resolved some time ago by the discovery of a third, most attractive choice:

3) Say the proposal is a great idea and then play for time.

We find that the patent laws are admirably suited to this third course, because a provisional patent lasts for one year only, and if the complete (and expensive) patenting is not done within the year, the invention becomes valueless and the inventor can be relied upon to go away quietly, though perhaps a little puzzled.

After one or two false starts, the CAM invention was first mooted to Mr P of the NRDC in early 1972, the details then being completely secret. Mr P advised the inventor (me) first to protect himself by filing a provisional patent in the Patent Office at a cost of one pound, and then to give the details to the NRDC. This he did in August 1972, and the waiting game began.

Mr Q of the NRDC selected option (3) with gusto, taking the inventor out to lunch and saying the invention (which it now appears he didn't really understand) was of great importance, and that the. NRDC hoped it would match or surpass their one major success, which was currently earning them some £4 million per annum. This enthusiastic evaluation (and all appraisals of the CAM invention by all government officials have been enthusiastic) was all verbal, and there were lengthy delays for various obscure reasons until six months later, when on March 1, 1973, Mr Q finally put his enthusiasm into writing: " . . . I believe you are on to something which could be of fundamental importance in the design, construction and operation of … (computers)."

It was now only necessary for the NRDC to hold off the inventor for a further six months on one pretext or another and the CAM invention would be valueless (and harmless). The inventor would then leave them in peace.

Periodically, Mr Q sent the inventor letters, saying he was anxious to expedite the matter and gain full patent protection. However, the inventor could not take the matter further,, because, throughout the whole year, Mr Q never once answered any of the telephone calls of the inventor, the inventor's wife, the patent agent recommended by the NRDC, or the technical expert brought into the affair by Mr Q himself. Neither did he return any of their calls during that year. He buttressed this position with occasional nonsensical letters.

As the eleventh hour (actually eleventh month) approached when it would be too late to start filing the full specification and save the invention, the situation became serious, so that I was finally forced secretly to guarantee the patenting costs (£1,700) to the patent agent himself. Also, he brought in a third party, an accountant, to try to get sensible communication going with Mr Q and the NRDC, but to no avail. (The crazy, incoherent negotiations between the accountant and the NRDC are hard to believe, and make another story. Suffice it to say that the NRDC was continually self-contradictory in the matter.)

In the end, when there were only four days left to D-Day, the NRDC said they would refuse to pay the patenting costs but were all the same very keen on the invention and anxious to support its development once patented..

With only four days of the year left; I now had no time to raise the money elsewhere, and asked a journalist to run a story on the disgraceful business. The journalist placed a single call to the NRDC, asking for the facts of the case. His call was immediately reported to the managing director of the NRDC, who called a board meeting that same morning. After the board meeting they called the reporter to say they had handled the CAM invention badly, that they were keen to support it, had reversed their decision on patenting costs, and a contract would be in the mail to the inventor that night.

Next day my accountant said the contract terms were unacceptable, so the NRDC corporation secretary told him to rewrite the contract as he wished. So after a delay of almost one year, a large amount of government money was given away under terms written by the recipient.

This first hurdle, patenting, successfully over, the waiting game recommenced, this time for the £40,000 to develop the invention. This new delay has now stretched into six months, and no meaningful communication between myself and the NRDC has occurred. However, the NRDC are careful to assure all inquirers that they are very keen on the CAM invention and anxious to support it.

Next week Ivor Catt issues a direct challenge to the DTI.

Spectator 23 February 1974

Computers

Challenging the DTI

Ivor Catt

The NRDC (National Research Development Corporation) was first asked to support the CAM invention eighteen months ago. Since then, though persistently claiming a strong desire to support it, they have continually prevaricated. No progress whatsoever has been made in the exploitation of the invention.

The NRDC, like the BBC, is an independent corporation, but under the wing of the Department of Trade and Industry. Nine months ago ACTP (Advanced Computer Technology Project), which is within the DTI itself, was asked for support, Like the NRDC, ACTP also expressed a strong desire to support the CAM invention, but again only prevarication has followed. We now have the absurd situation that all Computer oriented scientists in two separate branches of the DTI are very anxious to support the CAM invention, they believe the cost is trivial (£40,000) and the potential reward enormous, but they make no progress, being hopelessly tangled up in complicated rules and regulations.

The Inventor [Ivor Catt] hereby respectfully requests that the-Secretary of State for Trade and Industry resolve the situation, by saying either that

I) The CAM invention is after all no good and should not be supported by further government money, or

2) The CAM invention will be supported by the DTI, the specific terms of support being stated at that time.

The Spectator will publish the response of the Secretary of State. Alternatively, in three months' time it will publish to the effect that he is indifferent to problems arising in the Government's handling of invention and new industry, which both Mr Walker and Mr Heath have said are vital for the future of this country.

Next day there was a snap election, and the ministers I was homing in on disappeared. – Ivor Catt, 4.12.2018

Spectator March 2, 1974, p 275

Computers

The fettered giant

Ivor Catt

During the last four weeks I have written a series of articles discussing the chaotic state of a high technology industry, and the feeble government departments associated with such industries.

Those articles were the tip of an iceberg, a simplification of a complex subject. Some of the rest of the iceberg is discussed in my book http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x1bn.pdf , and yet more is only now coming to light as, carrying my computer invention with me, I stumble around the murky alleys of government and industry.

Perhaps the most valuable contribution of my CAM invention will be to shine a searchlight into the world of high technology in government, industry and university. A pretty awful mess it has exposed.

The key discovery that has been made is that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, no parties are motivated primarily by profit. Loyalty to a particular group, fear of appearing foolish, and a number of other motivations are stronger than the profit motive. (Professor Basil Bernstein's writings are relevant here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_Bernstein ) This is a valid, though unrecognised, position, because massive profit is necessarily highly disruptive of the established order, and order is what nearly all of us cling to.

The rejection of high profitability is enshrined in a cliché of business management and accountancy, the well-known principle that any business proposal claiming more than a reasonable (say 50 per cent) return on capital invested must be rejected as unsound. (Later in this article I shall discuss the methods used by technocrats to mask the larger potential of a very good idea.) To put it another way, "Society will not believe a project aiming at 1,000 per cent return on capital invested." This can be rewritten, "Society will not tolerate a project aiming at 1,000 per cent return on capital invested."

The reason why the latter phrasing is valid, is because the whole system of business finance and management is built on the thesis that massive return on capital invested will not occur. From this principle it naturally follows that control of business and industry should be in the hands of accountants (Weinstock https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=X4tIJIhL3jMC&pg=PA107&lpg=PA107&dq=%22the+collapse+of+gec%22&source=bl&ots=hj9-58T8OH&sig=ACfU3U1yuEfyGzwdPbKMdbWSFrYta4Je-w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiWmpnlzqfjAhU8UBUIHShhCZUQ6AEwAnoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22the%20collapse%20of%20gec%22&f=false )

and the like, men versed in marginal alternatives in a financial picture, because since we have outlawed massive profitability, this is all the freedom of action that remains to us, freedom to reduce our rental or labour costs by perhaps 20 per cent, or avoid an increase of some such small percentage.

However, in Britain we say that our only resource is brain-power. If the return on capital invested is 50 per cent or less, the return is by definition on capital, not on brainpower. If the investment were in brainpower, the return on capital used must exceed 500 per cent, otherwise we are back to a capital-intensive (not a brain-intensive) enterprise. It follows that the traditional (50 per cent return) approach to business and industry will always stifle the very industries that Heath, Wedgwood Benn, Walker et al say we must get into, industries centered on brain-power, inventiveness, rather than on capital, which we lack. Unfortunately, any move towards high technology (and other brain-intensive) enterprise would break the present stranglehold of traditional (non-technical) management upon industry, and lead to a rapid decline in their social standing, salary and security. Whereas today an engineer earns £2,000 and a non-technical manager £4,000, these rates would be reversed in a brain-intensive industry.

It is not surprising that a nontechnical administrator or financier of the traditional kind feels more loyalty to his own social group than he feels to the `country' (a vague concept in any case), and he will automatically move to stifle brain-intensive industries [Microsoft, Google]. It is normal for a group whom history is passing by to carry out a vigorous defensive rearguard. This is not particularly pernicious of them, because they have a responsibility to their families to try to protect their position, and because of ignorance they cannot in any case conceive of the explosive profit potential of high technology, that is, brain-power.

Technocrats looking for finance for a new venture understand these problems, and do not claim more than a small (50 per cent) projected return on investment. Also, they accept the intrusion into their enterprise of large numbers of personnel of the old kind (accountants, lawyers, salesmen, and generally quantities of bodies), many of them into top positions, and allow their new, brain-intensive enterprise to be made to look as much as possible like an old-style enterprise, perhaps one manufacturing cardboard boxes or shoes. Unfortunately, the old-style people and activities, once established in the enterprise, will have a natural fear of the brain-intensive activity operating in one corner, and what I call the 'management-technocracy guerrilla war' begins (see Computer Worship Pitman £1.80).

One of the anomalous results of this rule, less than 50 per cent return on capital invested, is that it is far easier to raise £200,000 for an enterprise than £40,000. This is because, even if successful, the rule says that the latter investment will lead to less than £20,000 per annum income, and a banker’s overheads are too large to service economically such a small enterprise. This is why all experts in the field of high technology financing told me that I should go for £200,000 finance, not £40,000. However, I persisted in asking for £40,000, and this is what has caused such apprehension all round. (No one has rejected my figures, however.)

Politicians need to appear to support new invention and industry, and for this purpose government departments are set up. Now if such a department were staffed by competent technocrats, they would have the arrogance to believe in their trade, and from time to time they would support a "£40,000 in, £5 millions per annum out" proposal.

Walker, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, earned his spurs as an asset stripper, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/assetstripper.asp , which by conventional business standards is quite dynamic: However, compared with the (as yet virtually unexploited) potential of high technology, asset stripping is mundane. So among politicians, even Walker will have an accountant's fear of high technology as a potential hostile power base.

As a defence against high technology and the technocrats within the departments under their care, a politician will either introduce or allow gross technical incompetence, as appears to be the case in the NRDC, or, failing this, stifle the technocrats by interposing an impenetrable buffer between the technocrats lower down and the political power to act higher up. For instance, if Walker allowed highly competent technocrats from his department, like E. A. Newman or D. 0. Clayden, in the same room as himself for three hours, he would come out much the worse and the power structure would be permanently altered. An admirable buffer between upstart technocrats and political power would be a military man, since the primary function of a military man is to keep the people below him and the people above him apart.

To sum up: The essence of accountancy and the pin-striped rest is balancing the books. The essence of uncontrolled hi-technology is un-balancing the books. Never the twain shall meet.

The day after, there was a snap election, and the ministers I was homing in on disappeared. Then we waited for some years for the next step. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x5cz2.htm . I was trapped by the saboteur NRDC, but once I got £1,000 out of them (equivalent to £20,000 today 2019), I could demand another government department, and was given ACTP. They took some years to change their rules to suit my case. ACTP put in the equivalent of £300,000 today (2019) for research into the CAM invention in three universities. This proved the idea, but the dying companies (Ferranti, Plessey, GEC) refused to touch it. Years later, self-styled “pirate”, Thatcher’s Sir Clive Sinclair set up a company to develop it with £16 million, and it came to market with acclaim – too late. The technology had changed in the delay of 20 years. )

http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x1a31.pdf

http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x1a81.pdf

http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x18r.pdf

http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x2bd1.pdf

http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x37h.pdf