Computing Britain

In the first episode, Hannah travels back to the 1940s, to hear the incredible story of the creation, in Britain, of the computer memory. Three teams from across the country - in Teddington, Manchester and Cambridge - were tasked with designing automatic calculating engines for university research. But which team would be first to crack the tricky problem of machine memory?

Hannah hears the incredible story of how a chain of British teashops produced the first office computer in the world. J Lyons and Company was the UK's largest catering company, with 250 teashops across the country. They also owned their own bakeries, a tea plantation and haulage firm, as Dr Tilly Blyth from the Science Museum describes.

In 1956, adverts enticed the British public with a brand new opportunity. Buy premium bonds for one pound, for the chance to win a thousand. At the time, it was a fortune - half the price of the average house. Behind this tantalising dream was a machine called ERNIE - the Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment.

Long before the heroics of the world wide web, the internet was born out of a mixture of American ambition and British thrift. Packet Switching was the name coined by Welsh computer scientist Donald Davies in an effort to link the early computers in the labs of the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington.

From the earliest days of electronic computers, commentators feared that mass unemployment would result from the efficiencies of computers and automation in the workplace. These fears would resurface over the decades, but came to a head towards the end of the 1970s with the coming of relatively cheap microprocessors.

As the manufacturing industries of the 1970s became the service sector of the 1980s, the BBC tried to help democratize the coming of the affordable microchip, to help re-equip a vulnerable workforce for a digital future. The BBC Computer Literacy Project was aimed initially at adults, but somehow ended up putting a beige BBC Microcomputer in the corner of nearly every classroom in the land.

In the 1980s, 'micro computers' invaded the home. In this episode, Hannah discovers how the computer was transported from the office and the classroom right into our living room. From eccentric electronics genius Clive Sinclair and his ZX80, to smart-suited businessman Alan Sugar and the Amstrad PC, she charts the 80s computer boom - a time when the UK had more computers per head of population than anywhere else in the world.

Computers in British schools and homes nurtured a generation of programmers who cut their teeth in the 1980s playing and writing video games. Hannah talks to the Oliver Twins, who as teenagers won a games-writing competition on ITV's Saturday Show. Spurred on by their success, the twins went on to write a bestselling games series featuring a loveable egg called Dizzy.

Hannah traces the dot com boom and bust in Britain between 1999 and March 2000.

Hannah tells the story of the little known British company in Cambridge that designs and build the ARM chip, found in almost every mobile device in the world, and the impact it has had in powering the digital age. The team at Acorn had designed the BBC Micro back in the early 1980s. In an attempt to stay ahead they decided to design a new kind of microprocessor chip, the RISC chip. They used it in the Acorn Archimedes which was the fastest computer in the world when it was released in 1987.