The dawn of the digital age began in World War Two with the invention of secret computers to break German codes. More generally, the war inspired huge advances in electronics on both sides of the Atlantic. By the end of the 1940s, it was clear that the future belonged to computers.
It was the telecommunications industry that had provided the bulk of the components and expertise from which the first computers were assembled.
In the end, the favour was returned because it was in telecommunications that the new computers were able to make their biggest early impacts.
Some of the boldest early steps into the computer age were taken in Britain. Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, did his main work at Cambridge University before joining the team of code-breakers at Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes.
By the 1950s the new generation of computers had already made the first machines look primitive.
Solid-state electronics, based on transistors and silicon, were beginning to replace bulky and fragile glowing valves of the 1940s.
The future of telephone switching...