Plessey Swindon site - the end is nigh?

[G6Tanuki]

Originally Posted by Junk Box Nick

A few weeks ago this subject came up with someone who once had a skilled technical job and now is a removal man and he had an interesting view of manufacturing in the UK: "Ask them to make one: brilliant. Ask them to make a hundred: forget it..."

That's totally the wrong way to think of it: smart doesn't 'make' one* or a hundred or a million - smart _designs_ one, then licences the intellectual-property-rights for others to make them - with a fee of 50p on each one manufactured.

Think about it like an author: he/she writes a book/play/TV-script - then sells the rights down the line to a publisher and gets a royalty on each copy. Only a fool would expect the author to produce each subsequent copy of the book him/herself.

* Of course if you're in certain market-sectors, the world may only *need* one of what you produce - and making more can be deeply stupid. The Mona Lisa would be worth much less if Leonardo da Vinci had produced more than just the one!

[threeseven]

Looking at it from another perspective, which countries have the largest, most powerful economies? Then look at their industry and what they make
Manufacturing provides jobs across the spectrum of skills, but an economy like the UK's has become is skill divided, retail, call centre, etc workers and then highly skilled and professionals with very little in between.

No disrespect either intended or inferred to those working in retail, call centres etc.

[whyperion]

Originally Posted by Junk Box Nick

The UK remains a world leader in the aerospace industry. You can bet there are brilliant electronics developments happening in the UK. We thrive in small-scale high-end niche industries. Like the guy said: "Make one - it's brilliant; make a hundred? - forget it..."

Unfortunately some of the areospace-(Graphite for turbine blades) looks like manufacturing might be going elsewhere in the EU).

Last time I looked at the statistics on heavy making stuff UK was still turning out more tonnage of steel, just with fewer people and on less sites.

[murphymad]

I worked at Plessey Semiconductors in Swindon for twenty years.
Before that both my Mother, Grandfather and my grandmother worked for Plessey in Swindon too.
I saw the first and second (successful) take over bid by GEC to acquire Plessey.
Although hostile, this did bring in quite a bit of investment to the Semiconductors division. I cannot say what the effect on the other divisions must have been.
The GEC owned Semiconductor companies were merged with Plessey to form GEC-Plessey Semiconductors and we all worked very well and had both good and bad times (the 5 year cycle). Factories worked at capacity and new technologies were rushing ahead of other world organisations much bigger than ourselves.
Then in 1996 Lord Weinestock retired and the GEC was put into the hands of "That idiot Simpson" as he was commonly known, who sold everything off as fast as possible, including us to Mitel in Canada. After a few years they decided to split the company up and we were re-named Zarlink Semiconductor. A stupid name that no one liked. Now it has all gone and the factory building as well.
The new developers have taken on a massive job of decontamination as the original factory was built in 1957 and had been filled with the nastiest chemicals you can imagine. There is going to be plenty of mess to clear and it will cost a huge amount.
Many of the people who worked in Swindon had few problems finding new employment as the reputation of Plessey Semiconductors was well known and respected. A lot of local companies have benefitted from taking on ex-Plessey employees.

Mike...

[G6Tanuki]

Re. murphymad's comments:

I had some significant contact with the computer division of GEC in the 1980s and early-1990s when they were based at the old Elstree Way site in Borehamwood [which had been part of Elliott Brothers previously].
It was interesting to see their whole approach - the 40xx/41xx-series minicomputers were targeted heavily at the process-control/industrial/defence market and built accordingly - meaning expensive! Trying to use them in general-purpose commercial/scientific applications was a real struggle - but that was where the market growth would be as the world moved away from mainframes.

|D|I|G|I|T|A|L| had their PDP11 series on the market at the time - much more a 'general purpose' architecture at a significantly lower-price-per-unit-of-processor-capacity.

GEC's answer to this - and DIGITAL's VAX/MicroVAX - was the "Series 63", which was funded to an extent through a sort of 'tied market' in association with the UK higher-education funding department of the day [1983-1987]. Though there were some useful spinoffs from the "Alvey Project" as it was known, the GEC series-63 was not one of them (its total sales worldwide being in the low twenties - on occasions that sort of sales figure was achieved in *two hours* for Digital's MicroVAX-II).

The other big issue for GEC [and their subsequent GEC/Plessey Telecommunications wing] was their failure (along with STC) to get the bulk of the contract from BT for the "System X" telephone-exchange project in the 1980s - this knocked out a steady source of cash flow on which a lot of the other business-units floated.

Ironically, back in the 1980s/1990s I was buying Plessey-badged memory cards to fit into the VAX systems we bought instead of the GEC System-63 we had originally been allocated funding for by the "Computer Board".

[emeritus]

Re the "millions" production run philosophy, in the 1970's the project that I was involved in for which Plessey were making the custom chips we designed, had a projected all-time requirement for less than 100 for one set of chips, which were for a specialised military application. As I recall, the ball-park costs in 1973 were :

Set of masks (5 layers)- £500
Cost of each good chip on a wafer - 50p
Cost of chip header (14 and 22 pin Military flat packs) - £5
Cost of testing the packaged chip to full mil spec - £50

3" wafers were the norm then.

Plessey semiconductors were certainly making some world-beating stuff then. Their high speed dividers that could cope with 1.2GHz input signals were unrivalled, and I think it was more than a decade before competitors caught up.

I too was with GEC when Weinstock retired, and well remember the madness of putting all their eggs in one basket and then dropping the basket that followed. Our department was reviewed by a team of management consultants that seemed to consist mainly of wet behind the ears graduates and proposed a totally impractical reorganisation that only came to nought due to the spending freeze that followed the bottom dropping out of the share price. Under the new management, employees in departments were periodically asked for their confidential views on how the company was performing, and I actually wrote in my response that the reorganisation made no sense and that the lunatics really had taken over the asylum. I don't know how confidential the responses really were, but by then I was sufficiently browned off that I didn't care.

[G6Tanuki]

For the sake of 'completeness' of this thread I'm going to be in the area later today so will do a "drive-by" of the Plessey Cheney Manor site and see if there's anything at all still left there to photograph.

[Skywave]

Perhaps a few old integrated circuits, embedded in the tarmac? Might take some finding though!

Al.

[G6Tanuki]

Why am I now motivated to author a science-fiction story involving the last remnants of a post-apocalyptic human civilisation desperately mining 'unusual' sources for the long-lost microchip that contains the key to their survival?

[G6Tanuki]

Here's the latest photos - the 3 flagpoles, and the raised "STOP" barrier are rather ironic.

[G6Tanuki]

And the last few: the "new"-looking buiding to the right of where the access-barrier is looks abandoned. I gather it was only refurbished/reclad a few years back.

[AC/HL]

With that conclusion, the end of the thread is nigh too.