The Guardian’s first Tech editor: ‘They gave me a demo and showed me things I couldn’t believe’
Technology isn’t a beat with a natural affinity for nostalgia. The industry thrives on its futuristic image, worships boy-CEOs and renders the past obsolete at a frightening pace.
Even in the eight years I’ve sat on the Guardian’s technology desk, the field I cover is frequently unrecognisable from what it was when I started – a world where self-driving cars were just around the corner, where virtual reality was an impressive technology that had failed to catch on with normal people, and where the world was starting to tire of the like-clockwork appearance of a new iPhone every 12 months.
Well, fine, but some things really have changed in that time. Just before I started at the paper, the Guardian broke the news that the NSA had been spying on Americans – and the rest of the world – through the tech sector, with more revelations to come thanks to the whistleblowing efforts of Edward Snowden.
It was the first sign that the lustre had started to come off the sector, an inkling of what was to follow a few years later as the “techlash” saw first Facebook, then the rest of the industry, fall from grace.
When Victor Keegan started at the Guardian, all that was a long way off. Over the years, he toured around the office, working as a reporter, a financial correspondent, the economics editor, a business editor, and a leader writer. But in 1981, he saw the potential for the Guardian to be on the leading edge of a new phenomenon.
“I can remember seeing a piece in the FT, buried on an inside page, and it just said ‘so-and-so has got the contract for the BBC Micro,” he said.
“No one had heard of them, but I thought, ‘That sounds interesting.’ It took me ages to track them down, in a very small room in Cambridge, but there they were, Chris Curry and Hermann Hauser. They gave me a demo of it, and showed me things I couldn’t believe.”
Launched in December of that year, the BBC Micro was designed and built by Curry and Hauser’s company, Acorn Computers, as a “microcomputer” aimed at the education market.
It was a phenomenal success: launching at just £235 – less than £1,000 even at 2021 prices. With an accompanying BBC TV show to teach children how to use it, one eventually ended up in the hands of four-out-of-five British schools, and i hundreds of thousands of British homes.
“When that happened, I thought, well, surely we ought to be writing more about computers in general,” Keegan says. He went back to the office, and proposed, along with Tim Radford, then the science editor, a new supplement to capitalise on the wave of interest: Micro Futures Guardian.
The section eventually launched in October 1983. “They had delays, and then they hadn’t got it right first time,” Keegan said. Some things, it seems, haven’t changed at the Guardian in the intervening time.
Jack Schofield, then a writer for Practical Computing magazine, was hired to write a how-to column, and Keegan went off to interview Tory MP Kenneth Baker for the first issue.
“He was then the minister in charge of information technology, but he had no clue about how to work the BBC computer. He had a civil servant there and would just be shouting downstairs to try to get them to make actual thing work.”
Almost a decade later, Keegan did it again. In the 1990s, the hot thing wasn’t computers in general, but a new development that was born in a research lab in Switzerland: the worldwide web.
As the web made getting online easier and more understandable for the average person, it fell to him to bring the Guardian online as well, which he did, with a print supplement, confusingly called “Online”. When Online went online shortly after, he could claim to be the first newspaper editor in Britain to launch a website.
One thing that stands out as we talk is how local so much of Keegan’s work at the Guardian could be. Acorn and Sinclair were pushing the UK into the Information Age from Cambridge.
In later years, Keegan would host meet-ups of London-based coders, launch the Guardian’s first website, and follow the mobile phone industry as it grew from a provider of “car phones” to the smartphone revolution – all without needing to spend too much time worrying about what was happening in Silicon Valley.
“The dotcoms, they were very approachable. There were all these things that were happening in Britain, you could go there and have drinks, that was all very open.
“The American companies definitely wanted you to report on them – Microsoft and all the other companies would have regular trips for journalists, but I never really regarded them as a source of news. Obviously you needed Windows for some things, and Apple would have its events and that sort of thing.”
There’s still a large British tech sector, of course. But comparing Keegan’s recollections of his two decades covering tech to my experience over the last one, and it can be faintly depressing how firmly the centre of gravity of the industry has moved west.
That’s partially a reflection of the scale of tech in general: with Silicon Valley companies now global power players in their own right, no technology reporter would be able to justify ignoring them to focus on more homegrown stories.
But it’s also a mark of how centralised the technology industry has become. The duopoly of operating systems, the cost of chip fabrication, the billions the big four are throwing at R&D – all mean that there’s little space for a midsized nation like Britain to develop a microclimate where that sort of local industry can develop.
The dotcoms were very approachable. There were all these things that were happening in Britain