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CREATING AN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ENVIRONMENT IN MILTON
KEYNES
by
DAVID FIRNBERG
Managing Director, EOSYS,
delivered to the Society on Monday 17th May 1982.
Jock Campbell Chairman of the MKDC is the chair.
I AM MOST grateful to you, Lord Campbell, for agreeing to
chair this evening’s discussion, because in creating an Information
Technology Strategy for Milton Keynes, we will be guided by your
enthusiastic championship of the precept that Milton Keynes should be a city
built for people. Developers’ principles and technological wonders must be
used to serve the people who live and work in the city, and what we
must strive to do is to create for them a harmonious environment. That is
what this evening is all about. How a total environment, the environment of
the city of Milton Keynes can benefit, not only economically but also
socially, from the enormous opportunities presented by the extraordinarily
rapid progress in the manifold aspects of information technology that we see
all about us now.
In my presentation this evening I am going to cover four
topics. First of all, some background information on Milton Keynes itself
for those of you who are not yet familiar with that city; secondly, an
introduction to those aspects of in formation technology which make it of
such great importance to the future of Milton Keynes. Then I will talk
about the strategy itself, and finally outline some of the major projects
that we are progressing for this strategy.
...
Microelectronics have made possible the digital
representation of any form of information. Increasingly digital
communications channels are pervading the country. System X, the new
telecommunication facility being introduced by British Telecom, is a digital
network with digital exchanges. There is a lot of excitement at the moment
about cable and the use of cable. Well, the cable potentially provides many
digital communication channels, and one of the starting points in Milton
Keynes is the fact that every new house that is built by the Development
Corporation is linked to the cable. There are already about 20,000 homes on
the cable. If we have such digital communications channels, be it at Milton
Keynes or elsewhere, then we can funnel down them all sorts of information,
not just the information we have previously associated with computer
processing, the data processing information, but the textual information,
specialist facilities, bibliographic information (the libraries of the world
are very much now going on line on computers), the public services such as
Prestel and other viewdata systems, company information, and very
interestingly the much more informal unstructured information that one finds
in person-to-person communication - letters, memos, telephone conversations,
reports, meetings, and of course the media themselves, the entertainment
world, the education world, the information world. All of this potentially
can be reduced to the common denominator of digital representation and
channelled down a digital communications channel.
...
The developing "world nervous system" exists not only at the
international level. Every country now, certainly in the Western world, is
considering very carefully how it should develop its national communications
infrastructure. We are certainly seeing that in this country. There has been
a revolution in attitudes towards the role of British Telecom, and this is
still carrying on if one believes the reports in the press this week of
government consideration of yet further privatization of British Telecom.
Project Mercury, a rival network to British Telecom is well under way, and
now there is the interest in a cable network for the United Kingdom. All of
these form part of our national networking plans.
A further stratum in this nervous system is the networking within an
organization. Any organization of any significant size needs to consider
what policy it should adopt for its telecommunications networking. It is
worth commenting that another project on which my company is working is to
advise the British Government on the telecommunications strategy for all
government administrative telecommunications. They currently spend two
hundred million pounds a year on administrative telecommunications
facilities. It has umpteen PABXs (telephone switchboards); numerous
terminals accessing various computers, and innumerable telephone calls!
Plans for the new PAYE system require 18,000 terminals linked to regional
computers. Thus the administrative civil service like every organization
needs to plan carefully for its networking arrangements. Finally there is
the networking within a site or a building, the local area networks about
which there is currently a great deal of excitement in the market place.
This hierarchy of networks makes up this world nervous
system. I was delighted to find a definition in a dictionary of a network
which described it as ‘an entanglement’. Hopefully we will see our way
through the entanglement, but there are many issues in the networking field
which have yet to be resolved.
Technology now enables us to manage any form of information
-voice, data, text, graphic, image, or moving pictures video information -
to capture it and input it into some system, to store that information,
manipulate it, process it, move it around, compare it with other bits of
information, add it together or separate it out and so on, to communicate it
and to output it to whomever it is required. Figure 4 [Not reproduced]
illustrates the various components of the products that are arriving in the
marketplace in droves; all of them have some elements of this information
cylinder.
Because they are arriving in droves, because the technology
is now so cheap, the marketplace is full of entrepreneurial salesmen seeking
outlets for their products.
That then is the technological drive. The drive of the
technology, however, is matched by a vacuum in the marketplace. A real need
and demand exists which makes the market very receptive to that drive. In
1976 an American magazine called Datamation produced the graphical
representation of Figure 5. [Not reproduced] The trends shown then are as
true now in 1982 and while the cost of people continues to go up the cost of
telecommunications, of computing processing, of storage power, of
information technology continues to come down.
All present in this room would probably accept that the
economy of this country, like the economy of all of the Western world,
depends upon the cost effectiveness of our industries, of our operations,
our bureaucracies. In order to strive for and obtain cost effectiveness we
must continually be striving for the best mix of what we do with people and
what we do with technology.
...
An important underlying philosophy of the Development
Corporation is that it is up to the public sector, the Development
Corporation and the government, to provide opportunities for service
providers and private sector industries to offer the most up-to-date
information technology products and services to users in Milton Keynes. In
other words the Development Corporation itself is not offering products and
services; it is creating an environment within which products and service
will be offered by the service suppliers, British Telecom and others, and by
the private sector. By thus acting as an enabler, the Development
Corporation intends to encourage the availability and the early take-up of
information technology in the city of systems that can then be replicated
elsewhere in the United Kingdom. The intention is for the city to carve out
a position which other cities will wish to follow, and a position which
which will place the United Kingdom very much in the forefront of the
practical application of information technology.
The Information Technology Strategy has four main
objectives, and they are of equal importance.
To attract enterprises to locate within Milton Keynes
Certainly the city wishes to attract new employing enterprises, companies
which will come into the city and create jobs. A key target market for this
is the office employment sector. Milton Keynes will also continue to attract
manufacturing industries, particularly in high technologies. At present two
new factories are opened every week. However, the city is now making a
particular thrust on the office employing sector and spearheading this with
a mixed development including one million square feet of office space known
as the Central Business Exchange.
To provide an environment within which existing
enterprises will flourish.
In addition to attracting new enterprises the Information Technology
Strategy is directed at ensuring that . existing enterprises prosper and
flourish, supported by the ready availability of information technology
products and services.
To enhance the quality of life for everyone living or
working in Milton Keynes
It is not sufficient to attract employing companies if there is not an
environment which is good to live in. Thus a further objective of the
strategy is to enhance the quality of life. I do want to emphasize that this
has equal importance with the others.
To enable Milton Keynes to become a centre of excellence which will be of
benefit to the country as a whole
Finally, the strategy aims to establish Milton Keynes as a
centre of excellence in information technology.
In achieving these objectives, there are four programmes of
activities:
TELECOMMUNICATIONS INFRASTRUCTURE
I have already described the extent to which the world is growing a nervous
system. Clearly we need to have that nervous system in place in Milton
Keynes. I would hasten to add that it is not a central nervous system; there
will be no master brain controlling it all. What we are looking for is the
ability throughout all the establishments in the city, be they offices,
schools, factories, homes, social centres or public areas, to be serviced by
a telecommunications infrastructure. The cable provides a good starting
point with its connections to 20,000 homes in the city. That cable was put
in quite a long time ago. It was primarily put in to provide television
programmes, although there is now also a company, SelecTV, with a licence to
provide films. There are, however,
certain practical problems about using the cable more extensively. British
Telecom are providing considerable support in determining how best to
construct the telecommunications infrastructure for the city and how best to
make use of the existing cable or modify it as necessary They are focusing
very seriously on Milton Keynes and have clearly identified it as a city
which they can develop and use as a showcase for British Telecom’s
facilities.
IT RELATED SERVICES
The second programme of activities has to do with the provision of
information technology related services. The purpose is to ensure that any
company operating in Milton Keynes, or that comes into Milton Keynes, has
readily available to it all the latest information technology services.
These will, of course, be provided on a commercial basis, but Milton Keynes
is giving every encouragement for these companies to make such services
readily available. Of course, there is not only the business and industrial
market, but also the domestic, social and education markets, all of which
are potential consumers of information technology services.
MARKET DEVELOPMENT
The third programme is aimed at creating a receptive marketplace. It is one
thing to have the infrastructure and related services, but in addition there
needs to be a marketplace which has understanding and comprehension and
which can value what is coming, and make use of it. In one respect Milton
Keynes is very fortunate; it is a young city. Most of f he people who have
come to the city have already experienced change, there has been some
uprooting in their life which has brought them to come to that city. The
industries which have come to Milton Keynes are very much high technology
ones. So there is already a market place which is sympathetic to change, to
new technology, to forging ahead. The third programme consists of activities
which focus very much on alerting that marketplace, encouraging it and
helping it. This marketplace exists not only within Milton Keynes but also
in the region for which Milton Keynes is providing the centre, the United
Kingdom and beyond.
EDUCATION AND TRAINING
The fourth programme of activity has to do with ensuring that there is an
information technology workforce in Milton Keynes, a continual flow of
people educated and trained in the skills that are needed to supply and use
the various information technology products and services. This programme
will be working not only within the existing educational structure, but also
establishing new training facilities. Milton Keynes, once again, has a lot
of things going for it. It has the Open University, it has a college of
further education, it has a secondary school and leisure complex called the
Stantonbury Campus with a shared resources unit that provides facilities to
the complex.
The final part of this presentation describes some of the projects that are
in hand to support these four programmes. These represent a selection from
the sixty or so projects, some large and some small, some significant and
some trivial.
It was clear from the start that Milton Keynes was embarking
upon what one could regard as really quite an ambitious programme and
that there should be some external authoritative sounding board. Accordingly
the Milton Keynes Information Technology Policy Advisory Group was formed,
to whom the strategy and major proposals are presented and with whom they
are discussed. The Policy Advisory Group is chaired by Sir Henry Chilver,
who is Vice-Chancellor of Cranfield Institute of Technology and prominent in
the information technology field. The membership ofthe Policy Advisory Group
is drawn from the leaders of technology in the United Kingdom and is set out
in Figure 6. [Not reproduced] This group meets twice a year and held its
first meeting early in May 1982. This first meeting was enormously
encouraging because not only was this group of busy and influential people
prepared to spend the time- they arrived about three thirty in the afternoon
and did not leave until nine o’clock in the evening - but when they left
they were fired with enthusiasm for the project, and keen to come to the
next meeting. That first meeting was primarily a scene-setter, but a number
of pointers came out which are worth commenting on. One of them was
particularly interesting as it highlighted that in addition to the
Information Technology Strategies and the attendant community and social
problems, there were also legislative and regulatory impediments to the
widespread application of information technology, as it is extraordinarily
difficult for the legislative machine to keep pace with the developments in
technology. Another message they reinforced was that Milton Keynes was a
marvellous site for disciplined experimentation. There is such an enormous
amount to learn about the real practical problems and opportunities that are
created by the application of this technology. At Milton Keynes there is an
almost ideal environment within which to learn it, with a Development
Corporation which is fired with enthusiasm, a community used to change, a
higher than national profile of information processing numerate people, and
a developing telecommunications infrastructure.
Success of the information technology programme in Milton
Keynes depends very much on the local community taking up the various
services, influencing the various proposals, and therefore a Milton Keynes
Information Technology User Group has been formed under the chairmanship of
Malcolm Brighton, who I think is with us tonight, which meets monthly to
review the programme, comment and contribute to it, from the point of view
of all sectors of the community. Businesses, retail outlets, the social
communities, the educational community, all are represented around that
table and provide very useful input to the evolving strategy.
It was felt important for the Information Technology
Strategy of Milton Keynes to have a physical focus, an embodiment, and that
embodiment is to be the Information Technology Exchange. The Information
Technology Exchange will open later this year in Central Milton Keynes, near
where the Central Business Exchange will be developed, and will occupy 8,000
square feet. A range of activities
are planned for the Exchange. One of the core activities will be a
Microsystems Centre. This is being encouraged and sponsored by the
Department of Industry with help from the National Computing Centre and aims
to provide a ready entrée to information technology, small computers.
mini-computers, microcomputers and so forth for the businessman who feels he
wants to know, but it is a bit concerned and worried about knowing. They can
visit the centre where there will be a dozen or so bits of kit which they
can go up to casually without anybody breathing over their shoulder saying
‘You silly fool, you should have pressed this button, not that one!’ Once
they have broken the ice they can seek further advice and training. There
will also be substantial exhibition facilities and a training centre. As
part of the Exchange commercial concerns are currently being sought who will
provide a range of services including word processing, reprographic
facilities, perhaps telephone answering services, maybe even an employment
bureau, and so on.
...
One further project is currently in the discussion phase but
it will, if implemented, certainly establish Milton Keynes as a centre of
excellence. The bottom level of the ‘World’s Nervous System’ consists of
local area networks, that is the interconnection of devices within a
particular site. The Information Technology Exchange will provide such a
site, as there will be lots of devices in there which will need to be
connected one to another and to the outside world. It would seem sensible
therefore to put in a local area network. The problem is that the local area
network technology is very new; suppliers can see an enormous world market
and as a result there are around 40 companies now offering products in this
particular field, all incompatible. It is a chaotic marketplace! The British
Government has also seen this as an important world market and that unless
in the United Kingdom we can establish a position we will be once again
swamped by imports. [oops!] With Government support it is hoped to establish
a Local Area Network Workshop in the Information Technology Exchange. The
Workshop will provide facilities for a variety of local area networks and a
variety of interconnections to other sorts of communications systems. In
phase two of the project, local area networks on different sites will
interconnect perhaps through the cable. Possible sites include the Open
University; Stantonbury Campus, where they are intending to install a
network of BBC micros; Scicon, who operate a substantial bureau in the city
and perhaps some of the special factory units that are being built to
attract high technology companies which are not quite sure whether they
require factories or research laboratories or offices. Phase three really
regards Milton Keynes itself as the workshop rather than the Information
Technology Exchange, with links between the various local area networks in
the Information Technology Exchange, the local area network servicing the
Central Business Exchange, the shopping centre and various other offices
throughout the city. Phase three would also include the Cranfield Institute
of Technology project for the library of the future with a microwave link
from the Information Technology Exchange to the library so that all users of
the various networks can have a window into the library of the future.
Finally, links would be provided to Project Universe which uses satellite
communications to link together major information-providing systems
throughout the academic world.
The Local Area Network Workshop is likely to be a major
test-bed system which will do a lot to stimulate the supply and the
effective application of local area networks within the United Kingdom. This
project will promote awareness through courses, exhibitions and conferences
on local area networks, provide demonstration facilities for the various
networks, make available skilled and experienced advice, both to suppliers
and users, provide development and testing facilities for local area
networks and more particularly for local area network standards as the
standards issue is paramount at the moment, and help identify the
commercial, political and technical problems that need to be overcome to
enable the opportunities of local area networks to be fully realized.
There are many other projects which form part of the
Information Technology Strategy for Milton Keynes. For example there is ITEC.
which will provide training for the non-academic sixteen to nineteen year
old, in electronics. The IT House will be opened as a demonstration centre
this autumn with a whole range of applications one is likely to see in the
home in the five and ten year time frame. The public utilities, gas,
electricity and water, are collaborating on a remote meter-reading project
over the electricity mains, there will be various conferences, exhibitions
and competitions and a project is being sought in electronic banking,
electronic funds transfer and electronic shopping.
My Lord, Ladies and Gentlemen, I believe that at Milton
Keynes we really do have the opportunity to establish a blueprint for the
twenty-first century, a community that will benefit to the full from the new
technology, and one that will be at peace with it. It is entirely
appropriate that the first public presentation of the Milton Keynes
Information Technology Strategy should take place in the lecture theatre of
the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.
DISCUSSION
THE CHAIRMAN: One could not conceive a more lucid and
enthusiastic exposition of a very complex subject. I still remain to be
convinced that information technology will be the friend of all sorts and
conditions of men, and that it will not make men its servant rather than the
other way round, but Mr. Firnberg’s enthusiasm is enormously infectious and
it has been very infectious in Milton Keynes. When we were planning Milton
Keynes, an American professor said, ‘If you had been planning it before the
industrial revolution you would not have foreseen the internal combustion
engine.’ We did not foresee three million unemployed and
we did not foresee information
technology. I hope the one will not have an adverse effect on the other.
...
MR. KENNETH M. MCKEE (Consultant): All these things can be
done, I am an engineer and I know they can be done, but who is going to
tackle them, because it will require vast investment to install the systems?
I do not think you can expect a
102,000 population to fund a system, which will probably not be cost
effective for some time and to pay back the capital that is required for
installation. Are you looking to the companies that install them to
subsidise investment, or to the authorities for the money required to start
it all off?
THE LECTURER: There are two things to answer in that. One is your use of the
word vast. Certainly some of the projects do require vast expenditure, but
because one sees an ultimate one does not necessarily reach that ultimate in
year one, or in month one. The viewdata system can ride in on the back of an
existing viewdata service. There is nothing very new in that. The actual
initial investment to get that off the ground in Milton Keynes would be
quite modest. It requires terminals in the public places, maybe there is a
hit of expenditure there, but there is an awful lot of advertising revenue
to cover it. It requires an operating bureau, but there are a number of
those already in existence. I could name four or five companies who are
already offering these sorts of services. There is already a marketplace in
terms of the number of companies or business users in Milton Keynes. So
though the projects themselves are large in scope, if one approaches them
sensibly and with proper commercial judgement they do not necessarily
require ‘vast’ expenditure.
What maybe well require ‘vast’ expenditure is the question
of the cable and telecommunication infrastructure. We have very strong
indications from the government about the importance they place on cable in
Great Britain, and all the cabling organizations are very conscious that
they have a lot to learn. If in the process of cabling a particular
community they can learn some of those lessons then we may say that the
investment is worthwhile, particularly because, once the cable is in place,
you can make charges for its use. The local area network workshop, which we
are already discussing with the Department of Industry, will need quite a
lot of public money to get off the ground because it is primarily a project
for the benefit of the whole of the United Kingdom. Equally there are a
number of other projects in Milton Keynes that public money is going into.
The important thing is that Milton Keynes Development Corporation itself is
not primarily a source of such funding. There has to be a case made to some
public funded body if public funds are necessary.
LORD WODEHOUSE [Hello!] (Glaxo Group Research): I was a chemist up until two
and a half years ago. I visit Milton Keynes to see one of the companies [Pericom]
that produces the equipment (video terminals) we use for accessing our
computer.
I have two points. The first one is a simple one about
Milton Keynes. It may be a city you cannot see from the road, but as far as
I am concerned every roundabout looks the same as every other roundabout,
and every time I go up there I get lost. The last time it took me three
quarters of an hour to find a map of the city anywhere so that I could
actually locate where I wanted to be. If IT 82 gives us anything, will it
give us something so that we can find out where we are in Milton Keynes?
Secondly, we do not have a very good record in this country
for making good use of the inventions we have thought of. Mr. Clive Sinclair
has done rather remarkably, he is a notable exception at the moment. But
Prestel, the brainwave coming along with the teletext of Ceefax and Oracle,
has to a certain extent been rather disastrous. Viewdata has not managed
what it might have done. Is the government going to make sure that the
facilities are provided? And even so, are the people ready for this? I may
be, but I am not sure whether all the rest of the community who are sitting
here this evening are ready for this. Perhaps we are a little early and we
will have to tread a little more cautiously. This is a beautifully ambitious
project, but I am not sure that it is not too fast, too much, too early.
THE LECTURER: Are we doing it too fast, are we being too ambitious? When the
Milton Keynes shopping centre was first mooted all the pundits said, ‘We
don’t know if it will work. Haifa million square feet?’ In fact Milton
Keynes built a million square feet and it is probably the most profitable
shopping centre in the country. The Milton Keynes track record of making
things work is very impressive. Where else in this country do you have two
factories being occupied, not just being built but with companies coming in,
every week?
If I can address myself now to Prestel; public Prestel has not been very
successful. Prestel is being increasingly successful, and more particularly
Viewdata rather than Prestel, in closed groups. I mentioned the British
Leyland dealer system which is a very impressive and successful one. The use
of Prestel by the travel agents is becoming widespread. The difference
between Prestel and the Milton Keynes application is rather like the
difference between starting up a new national paper and establishing a local
paper. Many people would argue that Prestel is not immediate enough for the
people who access the information. What we are doing at Milton Keynes is
quite specifically providing local, not national, information. It will
provide a gateway to national information for those who want it. There is
also the problem of the cost of accessing Prestel. No one yet knows the
answers to many of these questions. What will happen is that we will make
Viewdata available over the cable so that the user does not have to make a
telephone call or buy an expensive adaptor for the television set. [Viewdata
had an up-channel of 75bps.]
In the end success will depend upon the take-up and
therefore we have the major market development programme. The pace of
progress will go hand in glove with the pace of take-up. The objective in
Milton Keynes is that we will be foremost, but it does not mean to say that
we will be so far ahead that we just dive head first off the precipice.
...
SQUADRON-LEADER S. G. HALL, RAF (Retd.) (Department of
Industry): About the specific question of getting digital communication with
Milton Keynes, it just so happens that I can give an answer to that, and it
is one that should give us some pride. It is a fact that one of the first
140 megabit digital links in fibre optics will be between Milton Keynes and
Luton, and quite soon.
The IT year was intended to evoke a ‘public-led’ wish for
information technology. Two systems were tried in different parts of Japan.
One was a coax system, one was a fibre optic. In Japan ‘father’ chose the
programme and everybody looked at it. That is not the case in the United
Kingdom. Germany seems to be pressing on with a similar idea to Japan’s in
their Berlin experiment. We like the idea of having a technology that does
not mean throwing your old hi-fi and television sets away. I am not sure
that we are all going down the right road; we may be over formalized.
THE LECTURER: This is Information Technology Year, IT 82. What we are doing
in Milton Keynes is only tangentially to do with IT 82. In Milton Keynes we
are creating something which will have a continuing existence. Many of the
projects I have talked about will not feature until later years. It is a
much more substantive programme than IT 82. I do not know that I can give an
adequate answer to your final point. Certainly within Milton Keynes we aim
to make the best use of the best that industry can provide, and we would
certainly prefer that that industry is British industry, but in the end our
concern is the environment of Milton Keynes and therefore if our overseas
competitors provide things that are better and more appropriate to Milton
Keynes we will use them. The extended use of the cable arid its enhancement
will make possible far more services through the television network. Whether
this will require people to throw their old television sets away, or whether
these additional services can be accommodated with cheap or no adaptors, has
yet to be demonstrated. But I do think that the UK can approach the
application of this sort of technology in a far more human way than the
Japanese. We are not a dictatorial society here. I do believe that in the
end we will get a happier compromise between technology and people than
perhaps one might in some of the more autocratic races.
THE CHAIRMAN: I am sure we would all want to thank David Firnberg for his
lecture and for answering the questions as frankly and clearly as he did. I
think it would not be disrespectful to your enthusiasm to say that it is
bound to breed questions, and it is bound to breed some cynicism, and I
think that this is healthy. I for my part hope that information technology
will not compound the follies of governments and
bureaucracies and even boards of directors, but will in fact enable the
individual to flourish and to generate his own personality. There must
always he the- fear that these systems suppress rather than encourage the
individual personality. I would want to make it clear that at Milton Keynes
this IT is only one of the many fields of activity that we are tilling.
Because of your enthusiasm, Mr. Firnberg, and because of the clarity of your
exposition it could sound as though Milton Keynes was only about information
technology. It is, as you have said, about people, and it is about all sorts
of people and all sorts of aspects of their lives and their recreation and
their families. What we follow we follow with enthusiasm, but nothing
succeeds like success, and nothing fails like failure. I very much agree
with what the last questioner said. We are responsive in the Development
Corporation to public views, and we make it our business to be so. It is
very important that you should have made us think about this at Milton
Keynes. Information technology is not going to take over Milton Keynes, but
is Milton Keynes going to be able to harness information technology for the
good of all sorts of people?
Thank you very much indeed not only for your lecture this
evening but for all you have done for the Development Corporation in Milton
Keynes.
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