Re: Germany looking to end reliance on US tech giant

The Brits invented railroads and all manner of stuff in WW2, like cavity magnetrons, Bletchley Park (codebreaking), and so on.

But to manufacture on sufficient scale during WW2, these were passed on to USA industry.

Various pundits recently commented that the US Innovates, China Imitates, and Europe Regulates.

Joe

Ohm's Law (Ohm) Magnetic induction (Faraday) Capacitor (Leyden) Thermionic diode (Fleming) Pentode (Tellegen & Holst) Gyrator (Tellegen) Voltage multiplier (Cockroft & Walton) Programmable computer (Flowers) Long-tail pair (Blumlein) Miller-effect integrator (Blumlein) Transformer bridge (Blumlein) Stereophonic disc recording (Blumlein) CPS iconoscope (EMI) Cavity magnetron (Randall & Boot) Compact cassette (Philips Natlab) Compact Disc (Philips/Sony) Plumbicon (Philips)

All pretty old. Brits still invent, but do it mostly outside of the UK.

Joe

I would, Linux is my daily driver :-)

With LibreOffice, recently we can generate PDFs that include also the original LO file for edit. Maybe they are doing something similar?

Nope. Doesn't rotate here, just a static photo.

Some of that happened before there was a USA. And tubes aren't that popular any more.

I just don't see a lot of the HP/Intel/Apple/google/facebook sort of effect in europe or asia, where a couple of guys in a garage or a dorm room, without funding, often college dropouts, start trillion dollar industries.

And I don't see a lot of small niche electronics companies. The UK seems to have more than mainland EU, but still not many.

It was there - but the people were fighting for survival and didn't have time or resources to spare on academic research.

Only 5 of them are exclusivly thermionic devices, the rest are more general concepts. How do you thaw and heat your ready meal?

What's the point, we hardly have any production facilities and the markets are very small. If you start to become successful the Government will find a way of driving you out of business or a Chinese firm will steal your ideas.

British industry (what's left of it) desperately needs engineers - British management thinks they can manage without them.

The ARM processor is a British creation. More than 300 billion have been built.

Comparing a continent sized country to a continent of small countries, half under communism until the 90s. Assuming megacorps were wanted, which economy would support them? The euro isn't 30 years old yet and there's no Europe language.

Tech companies get started all the time in all sorts of environments. CERN did HTML and a bunch of other stuff, off the top of my head.

I don't see many niche Chinese electronics engineering companies either.

Do British engineers start their own companies?

I'm not being nationalistic rah-rah USA!! or anything, but I am interested in how different cultures encourage or discourage electronics startups.

For example, the Germans, I think, have too much respect for academics and degrees and titles for something crazy like Apple to be supported.

I was invoved in one tech startup in Milton Keynes, sort of a spinoff from Oxford. We nerds took it seriously, but management pumped-and-dumped and walked away with $20 million dollars and basically left it to die.

Raspberry Pi is British too. It was nurtured by Broadcom.

Yes, of course. But, built where?

Joe

There is Pragmatic

Flexible ICs do seem kinda strange.

Not if they've got any sense. It is extremely rare to find an engineer involved in management in the UK.

In the UK inventors are officially encouraged to start small businesses, taking all the risk themselves. Then they are wrung dry and thrown away.

No surprise there!

No, he promoted radio but didn't invent it.

Baird promoted television but he didn't invent it.

Wheatstone promoted the four-arm ratio bridge but didn't invent it. (He invented the concertina.)

Try radar, or the brain scanner, or the internal combustion engine.

When reported on in the US.

Not invented here.

Bill Sloman, Sydney

Worse. They think that they can manage them into being more productive.

I had one manager who though that design reviews were a waste of time, and sent circuits out for layout and manufacture before they had been reviewed. At least one of the bugs that took us months to track down would have been picked up at a proper design review.

In another case the carry logic, which I'd flagged as needing carefully tinkering in the design specification, turned out to be marginally too slow when I finally got at it and could do a waste case analysis, long after we'd put it onto a very expensive printed circuit board which didn't work.

Only the ones with rich relatives.

Graham Plows, who invented the electron beam tester as a graduate student, set up the company Lintech to exploit the idea, and made a bundle, early on. Sadly he was mainly interested in making a machine that was easy to sell, rather than one which was reliable in use.

His engineers were always busy adding a new gimmicks, rather than fixing the bugs in earlier gimmicks. One of his engineers - Neal Richardson - got bought up by Fairchild, which was in turn bought by Schlumberger, and built a more reliable electron beam tester. Lintech didn't sell another machine after the Schlumberger machine hit the market.

There are lots of ways that can work. Venture capitalists are not the only potential source of capital. Fisons - a big agribusiness in the UK

- used to look for small innovative projects they could fund and float. I worked for one of them - IAsys - for a while, before they sold if off to Thermoelectron. I built my 1 mK thermostat for them.

Seimens and Intel both built electron beam testers. Neither did well.

Funny.