Computing the long range: inventing and marketing the future in the British telecommunications system, 1966-1981

This article is a history of computerized futures in the British telecommunication system’s Long Range Planning Department from 1966 to 1981. This department, later known as the Business Planning and Strategy Department, played an important role in the telecommunications system’s transition from public corporation and monopoly in the late 1960s to competitive, denationalized industry in the early 1980s. Computers occupied much of the department’s concerns, from their use as simulations to generate business plans, to their presence in futuristic visions. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the department used computer models to reinforce policy and purchasing decisions, while also distancing the business from worrying visions of computerized state control. With both these matters, the department aimed to ‘invent’ futures that would preserve the telecommunication system’s state monopoly. By the early 1980s, however, the department instead used models to educate managers about market dynamics, and computers stood as icons of a Thatcherist, small government future. Computers thus performed two functions central to the shifting political-economic status of the British telephone system. Technologically, they moved from simulating purchasing decisions to market dynamics, and symbolically, they moved from representing the over-reaching state to aiding its contraction.