The Management of Microprocessors

Abstract

1. Preface There are by now no sentences left with which to make a dramatic introduction to a paper on microprocessors. The very best sentences have long since become part of common parlance, and most of those were never true anyway. The real facts about microprocessors are increasingly mundane and certainly socially depressing: as things stand right now it is quite uncertain that Britain will be a richer, more contented land by the year 2,000. There is no point in pretending that everything is fine. Most things are fairly bad: the rate at which British industry is making any attempt to come to terms with the microprocessor; the rate at which microprocessor engineers are being produced; the relatively low status afforded to anything practical; the evidence to date of union attitudes towards technology‐originated redundancies; all of these are cause for concern. We are in the middle of something qualitatively different from the last 50 years of industrial change, and the social implications are more than most will admit to. Employment will drop. To believe that workers replaced by microprocessor systems will inevitably find jobs in the construction of those same microprocessor systems is as foolish as thinking that horses replaced by motor cars could find jobs in the various branches of the auto industry.