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Embedded Systems Europe
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These are my own personal views and not those of my company Phaedrus Systems see www.phaedsys.com which is where the full version of this column, with links etc, resides under the Documents tab.
The title may shock a bit but it was designed to grab your attention. Also to shame the BCS into some action which it really should have taken all ready. Many years ago in the depths of a dark time for Europe many engineering innovations happened. Some were evolutionary and some revolutionary. One that was revolutionary beyond anyone’s wildest dreams happened at Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes in the UK.
Now I don’t mean the oft-touted Enigma stuff. That was evolutionary not revolutionary and apart from the British, the Poles, Dutch, Czechs, French and Germans all had a hand in that. In fact much of modern cryptography came out of central Europe.
What I am referring to is the birth of the electronic stored program computer. Bletchley Park is the home of The Computer. That is the real legacy of Bletchley Park, it is the place where modern computing springs from. It change, or rather revolutionised, the world.
Bletchley Park needs some assistance to be saved… I know you have all heard this before but this time it is very different. The actual infrastructure of the buildings is failing. If the famous huts are not renovated “NOW!” they will not exist in, it has been estimated, three years. After that there will be little left to save. They need £9 million to save the birth-place of computers. In the current scheme of bailouts it is an insignificant drop in the ocean.
Several groups are trying desperately to raise money see Sue Blacks site http://savingbletchleypark.org/ it is worth a visit. There is also the petition to the Prime Minister. http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/BletchleyPark/ This is for UK Nationals only but I would urge all Brits to sign it. Unfortunately with all the political eyes on the 2012 Olympics, funding form all the sources you would think should be supporting this cause are looking the other way. Even the “heritage” funding groups don’t seem able to help. Sadly it is seen almost as “just another war-museum” rather than the place that changed the world.
So why am I ashamed to be a BCS member? The Computer that changed so many things in the world gave the British Computer Society its reason to exist. So having contacts at Director level in both the BCS and the IET, I contacted them to ask what, besides nice words and photo opportunities they are doing to help, the BCS in particular.
Well the response was underwhelming. The IET Director side-stepped and passed it to a colleague whose response was nothing. So NO RESPONSE from the IET for a place where it’s members invented the computer.
The BCS did give me a reply… one I am tempted to post on a web site. In brief it said that with the current economic crisis the BCS had no spare funds. The BCS is guilty of killing its parent by neglect.
So what I am proposing is that if every member of the BCS and the IET instead of renewing their membership this year they donate the equivalent to Bletchley Park. Do the maths, 60,000 BCS and 140,000 IET. That is 200,000 multiplied by about £80. Potentially £16 Million. That sum of money would save Bletchley Park. Enable all of the renovation and see it safe and make it self-sustaining.
I recommend that all BCS and IET members write to the Directors to inform them that unless the BCS and IET donate some serious support to Bletchley Park, more than just kind words and photo opportunities, instead of renewing you will donate your membership to the Park when it falls due. I think the loss of a years subscription from most of the BCS and IET membership will clarify matters for them.
If only half the membership do this it will make such a difference that the immediate problems will be solved. Bletchley is a sight of global significance to the world at large never mind the computing world. Yet it is kept, barely, alive by volunteers and charity fund raising.
Bletchley Park have now set up on Tipjoy: a site which enables you to give very small amounts of money very quickly and easily (1minute) to causes you care about. See http://tipjoy.com/rmD
Having made myself persona-non-gratis with the BCS and the IET I shall turn back to my comments in last months column, where I became a target for the open source community. Thanks for the emails.
The interesting point was made that if you search on Linus, GPL and DRM you will find that there is much dissention within the FOSS camp. It seems there is trouble in paradise the like has not been seen since Henry VIII wanted to change the way the Pope ran things…. I make a deliberate religious analogy as much of it comes down to the vision and ethos (or religion) of Open Source. It seems there is now a mix of GPL2, GPL3, LGPL and GPLL. Confused? Well many seem to be and some who were not realised, on closer inspection, that they did not see the full implications or what is happening in practice. Now they are confused.
It appears that whilst Linus does not like GPL3, the way it handles DRM etc and wants to keep the Linux Kernel GPL2, due to the way Linux packages, with all the drivers, utilities and modules, work they are becoming by default GPL3. This confusion between GPL2 and GPL3 in the same packages is causing some companies to think again about FOSS. Even some of the FOSS people who contacted me admitted that it is not as easy as it was to sort out the licensing.
The other thing I have noticed of late is that the costs for supported GCC compilers are getting to be the same as for commercial compilers… not that GCC is as efficient. GCC is, I am told by several people who understand the internals of compilers, something like 15 years behind the commercial compilers. So something is going to have to change, as faith in the Open Source way of life is not going to be enough in 2009. People are going to be very careful about adding up the real costs
.
This is why the Qualified Electrician I use spends £400 on a cordless drill whereas mine cost £25 at the DIY supermarket. As he said to me: decent tools, though expensive up front, save a fortune over the following years. This came home literally when having the right tools meant fitting a new wall socket took a fraction of the time It would have taken me to do.
A final thought: Why did 1400 people attend last years UK Embedded Systems Show? Whilst 16,000 attended Embedded World in Nuremberg? As for the shows in the US… they are huge. The UK’s embedded industry is the fifth larges in the world and second only to Germany in Europe. If this was reflected in attendance at the UK Embedded Systems Conference we should have 12,000 people attending. So why don’t British Engineers attend shows? More to the point why don’t YOU attend the largest UK embedded event? Best excuse wins a prize.
Author Details and contact
Eur Ing Chris Hills BSc CEng MIET MBCS MIEEE FRGS FRSA is a Technical Specialist and can be reached at This Contact
Copyright Chris A Hills 2003 -2008
The right of Chris A Hills to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988