 mix of all four is disappearing, or has already disappeared. The process started some time ago. Immediately after the Second World War, a decision was taken to capitalise on the work that Alan Turing had done at Bletchley Park on the Colossus code-breaking machine and build a general-purpose electronic computer. The work was done at the National Physical Laboratory and was based on Alan Turing's conceptual discovery of the Universal Turing Machine, a computer that is not structured to carry out particular tasks. The result was a computer, the Automatic Computing Engine 1 that at the time was probably the fastest in the world. http://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk/icons_of_invention/technology/1939-1968/IC.059/ Making Telecoms Work: From Technical Innovation to Commercial Success, First Edition. Geoff Varrall. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Making Telecoms Work Thirty years later Seymour Cray delivered a Cray 1A supercomputer² to the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Authority where it still remained in 1990, the last operating Cray 1A in the world. The machine cost £8 million pounds and had a Freon cooling system and an early form of vector processing that allowed the computer to achieve then unrivalled operating speeds. Both of these machines can be traced intellectually back to the 1832 Babbage Difference Engine - the ancient ancestor of today's modern computing industry and therefore by default the ancient ancestor of today's modern telecommunications industry. In fact, it might be intellectually more rigorous to describe these not as computing or telecommunications networks but as information networks, networks that have the potential to transform the world in terms of social and economic progress, education and health and possibly even environmental sustainability. There are, however, fundamental differences between computing and communication in terms of cost and investment return that need to be factored into these global ambitions. It may also be that present telecommu