NRDC and the Market

The National Research Development Corporation (NRDC) was set up in July 1949 to encourage the commercial exploitation of the flood of British ideas that had emerged during and after the Second World War. Fortunately, the early NRDC documents have been catalogued and preserved in the (British) National Archive for the History of Computing (NAHC), currently housed at the University of Manchester. As explained in the preface to the NAHC’s holdings of NRDC papers, ‘during the 1950s, computer development was the single most important aspect of the NRDC’s activities’. The broad-brush story of government policy on the exploitation of computer technology and the role of the NRDC has been presented by John Hendry in his 1989 book [1] and summarised by John Crawley, formerly of NRDC [2]. However, neither of these sources provides detailed assessments of computer hardware and software, nor of the deeper interactions between NRDC and Elliott Brothers (London) Ltd.