Exhibition celebrates the birth of 'Tech Town'

An exhibition marking the diamond jubilee of the birth of Britain's own Silicon Valley is taking place in Reading.

US computing firm Digital Equipment Corporation set up shop, quite literally, above a furniture store in the town in 1964.

Its arrival began the transformation of Reading's economy, from one based around "beer, bulbs and biscuits" to bytes, as it switched from reliance on the brewing industry, biscuit making and horticulture and became the UK's first "Tech Town".

The exhibition at Reading Museum will tell the story of how in the years since, the town has become home to the UK headquarters of global brands from Microsoft to Chinese Telecoms giant Huawei.

"1964 was pivotal in Reading's history," says exhibition curator Brendan Carr.

After starting out with just two employees, DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) grew "extraordinarily quickly" and within 15 years was employing 2,000 people.

Other firms quickly followed suit.

Mr Carr says: "Today Reading is at the heart of on of the biggest ICT clusters in the UK with over 11,000 tech-related businesses in the area and something like 12% of the local population is involved in this industry."

As DEC grew rapidly, the company took over buildings across the town.

Ken Salmon joined as an engineer straight from University in 1974.

People like him worked in what he described as a "garden shed", away from the executives and sales team in the town centre.

"Computers were a mystery to an awful lot of people in those days," he explains.

"I really liked to be hands on and design things, so it was a great job for me."

DEC, or "digital" as it sold itself to customers, was one of the companies leading the way with mini computers.

These were large affairs compared to today's laptops and tablets - let alone smart phones.

But they were still a huge advance on what had gone before, like the huge machine pictured in the exhibition being lifted, by crane, into place at Berkshire County Council's Shire Hall, around the time DEC arrived in the town.

DEC was historically number two to IBM, but "being the underdog" was what attracted Shaheed Haque to them when he graduated from Oxford at the turn of the 1980s.

"One of the things that was really cool about them, was that they didn't require you to wear a suit," he recalls.

"It was just so much fun. For years I would hear people talk about the misery of their working life and I was so spoilt by the environment at DEC."

The exhibition features some of DEC's products, many on loan from the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley.

Among them is equipment from the nearby Atomic Weapons Establishment, just a few miles outside Reading.

Computers played a huge role in the design of the UK's nuclear warheads and, following a ban on test detonations, took on the role of simulating how they would behave.

Although they moved into desktop PCs, by the late 1990s DEC was in trouble.

The business was taken over by Compaq, which in turn became part of Hewlett Packard, which remains in Reading to this day.

One of the sites they had bought during their expansion - on land once owned by Sutton's Seeds, the bulbs part of Reading's economic past - is now home to Microsoft.

"We are living through this digital revolution, which is 60 or 70 years old," says curator Brendan Carr.

"It's still unfolding and getting faster and faster."

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