I went recently to the Victoria & Albert Museum in South Kensington, having stayed the night in my favourite Premier Inn hotel at Putney Bridge. It was formerly the headquarters of ICL – International Computers Limited – a British attempt at trying to see off the large American computer giant IBM. Britain had led in computing up to and into the Second World War, but as compensation for underwriting the cost of the war, the US insisted that Great Britain – as it was then called – surrender many of the advances it had made in computing.
