/btt/ - British Technology Thread

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At last, a thread to celebrate the many technological contributions, inventions, and innovations from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland!

Did you know that Charles Babbage designed his famous difference engine and the Analytical Engine during the 19th century in England? The latter, though it was never built during Babbage's lifetime, was the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described as Turing-complete.

Did you know that the first and second stored-program computers, the SSEM (also known as the Baby) and EDSAC were built in Manchester in 1948 and Cambridge in 1949, respectively?

Did you know that ML and Idris both come from the UK? The UK is an international hotspot of functional programming language design and research. Robin Milner, Simon Peyton Jones, and Edwin Brady all call this sceptred isle home.

Did you know that the BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum jumpstarted the home computer revolution back in the early 1980s? The famous rivalry of Chris Curry and Clive Sinclair led to countless British schoolchildren being able to tinker, experiment, and program computers. The R&D section of Acorn Computers, the company behind the Micro, later spun out to form ARM, the market leader in mobile processors.

God Save the Queen! What British technology have you used today?