Moving Targets: Elliott-Automation and the Dawn of the Computer Age in Britain, 1947-1967 (review)

Simon Lavington's Moving Targets is an account of the rise and fall of British computing manufacturer Elliott-Automation. It strives to contextualize Elliott's many advances within the wider scope of British, American, and global computing. Lavington's work charts the company's prehistory and inception in the decades surrounding the Second World War to its eventual financial woes in the 1960s and its absorption into ICL—the government-supported merged company created in 1968, largely to compete with IBM.

Lavington argues that Elliott, whose nineteenth-century roots as an instrument-maker positioned it for a critical role in the British computing industry, was a key agent in the growth of a new style of economic and social interaction often referred to as "the information age" (p. v). Over the course of the book's fourteen chapters, Lavington charts Elliott's rise from its naval work during World War II to its heyday in 1961 (when it supplied half of the UK market in computers), on to its effective removal from the sphere of global—and even national—contenders for a significant share of the computing market by the late 1960s.

Lavington shows how Elliott can, at different points, be a synecdoche for early British and American computing. Funded by the Royal Navy in wartime, and the Ministry of Supply's defense programs through the 1960s, Elliott's story shows how electronic computers were rooted in military applications and only gradually became civilianized and domesticated to take on the image of a commercial, peacetime information appliance.

Part of the Springer History of Computing series edited by Martin Campbell-Kelly, this book focuses on making the history of computing more accessible to a wider audience by linking it to broader historical changes. Lavington's thesis, that military applications and funding under-girded the very concept of an "information age," and that Elliott's story well represents this process of turning electronic swords into plowshares, is useful to both academics and casual readers.

Lavington ambitiously interweaves the stories of all of Elliott's various technological advances. Military computation, industrial process control, avionics computing, commercial data processing, and more are brought together in an attempt to show not just the progress of the company and its effects on the computer industry, but the technological scope and momentum of the industry itself. Thus Elliott and the industry are discussed in terms of their co-constitutive relationship—not only with each other but also with the changing political, economic, and (to a lesser extent) social environment.

Chapters 1 through 3 detail Elliott's navy involvement, particularly in the realm of radar research, while chapter 4 transitions into postwar nuclear-power research through a discussion of analog computing techniques developed for cold war missile weaponry. Chapters 5 through 9 range over Elliott's postwar scientific research funding and its work in instrumentation and industrial process control. These chapters begin to bring the reader into more familiar territory: the growth of automatic data-processing techniques using electronic computers for all varieties of business and government enterprise. Along the way, Elliott's work in oil refining, steel processing, and even typesetting are woven in, and the development of software at Elliott in the 1950s and 1960s provides a much-needed corrective to the focus on hardware that often dominates popular histories of computing.

The final five chapters of Moving Targets discuss the British and global computing market using the successes and failures of particular Elliott Automation projects to illustrate larger points about changes in the industry. The "long and painful process" (p. 469) of Elliott's decline, from roughly 1968 to 1988, is also a way to discuss the national and global impacts of the British computing company mergers that resulted in the creation of ICL and the destruction of a field of smaller, competing companies.

The text's excellent tables, charts, and photos...