One other observation on the Inmos story that I don't believe has been made elsewhere in this thread is the degree to which the company seeded the development of a number of highly innovative and successful companies in the Bristol area: Meiko, Division, Pixelfusion, Xmos, MotionMedia, PicoChip to name but a handful.
Such a shame that the UK government cannot sustain an industrial strategy. For the relatively tiny amounts of money discussed in this article -- even £125m was not a huge amount of money in the 1980s -- today we wouldn't be having this conversation about how advanced chip manufacturing cannot be done in the UK. And we could say the same about nuclear power and telecoms where the UK had a lead and chucked it away.
