On 22 September 2026, Computer Weekly turns 60. To mark the milestone, we asked some of our friends – experts, parliamentarians, IT leaders and suppliers – for their perspectives on how tech has changed their lives over six decades. What’s changed the most for you since then?
Computer Weekly’s 60th anniversary is a prompt for reflection – on careers, on the industry, and on just how much has changed.
The story of the past several decades in technology is, in many ways, the story of how tech escaped the machine room. Slowly at first, then completely, until it became inseparable from every corner of modern life. Or did it?
The world before the PC
When I entered the industry, we didn’t call it digital technology. It was IT, information technology, or simply computing. The name reflected the heritage – calculation, processing, control. And although microprocessors were already beginning to change things, computers still lived in special places – machine rooms.
These large, air-conditioned, access-controlled environments were hidden behind swipe cards and glass walls, guarded by specialists who determined what individuals and organisations could and couldn’t do with computing power. IT was expensive and fragile. If you needed something done, you submitted a request and waited. Technology mattered, but it wasn’t part of everyday life.
Disruption one: the personal computer
That began to change with the arrival of the personal computer, which I’d pick as the first major disruption.
For the first time, meaningful computing power escaped the machine room and landed on desks. That single shift overturned long-held assumptions. Business users no longer needed to ask permission to compute. They could simply switch on a device and solve problems themselves.
The openness of the PC’s architecture, and the business models adopted by IBM, Intel and Microsoft, allowed an ecosystem to flourish. Thousands of new providers emerged, building software and services for entirely new categories of user – marketers, educators, line managers. PCs spread rapidly across offices, factories, shops, schools and homes, carried along by the applications that ran on them.
Critically, these groups weren’t just using technology. They were buying it, with their own budgets. It was calculated that chief marketing officers were spending as much on technology as chief information officers. That wasn’t a curiosity – it was a signal. Technology had moved from the back office to the front line.
Disruption two: the internet and the web
The next transformation came as the players in this new ecosystem recognised the value of connecting all these devices together. Enter the internet and the World Wide Web.
Customers and partners became part of the digital architecture itself. Applications were no longer confined within organisations – they spanned entire value chains. Anyone of my vintage will remember the word we coined for this – convergence. Computing, networking and telecoms working seamlessly together. Well, most of the time.
“The concurrence of vast data volumes, elastic computing power, the proliferation of ever-more-capable processors, and truly global platforms turned what had once been constrained into something that now appears poised to change everything”
Julian David, TechUK
This sparked a wave of innovation. Personal digital assistants and handheld music players appeared. Mobile phones shrank and gained features. Keyboards were bolted onto phones; phones were grafted onto organisers. Almost everyone carried one of these devices, and many of us carried all of them. Going out meant collecting an army of gadgets.
Disruption three: the smartphone
The world was ready for something to simplify all of this. After a few early attempts, that something arrived with the launch of the iPhone and the first Android devices.
Computing, communications, media and services collapsed into a single device that people chose – actively chose – to carry everywhere. The smartphone was not a better phone. It was a platform. And it meant that computing had truly, finally escaped the machine room. It was everywhere.
The machine room returns, as the cloud
As devices proliferated, things became fragmented, difficult to manage and difficult to secure. Data needed to be standardised and aggregated. And so these devices began to be integrated into networks connected to, yes, centralised computers back in the machine room.
Something had fundamentally changed in the relationship between users and the IT function, however. This was not going to be a return to backlogs and permission slips. Everyone wanted a different, more flexible model. And once again, technology delivered it – cloud computing.
Early sceptics argued that the economics didn’t stack up, that no one would build it at scale. The recent results from the major hyperscalers provide a fairly comprehensive answer to that question.
Others said it was too complicated. I remember having exactly that conversation with the UK government’s CIO, and working with the industry body I now lead to help develop a plan for government’s transition to cloud.
Cloud computing was not merely a cost-saving model. It was an architectural inevitability, and it cemented the enduring role of the machine room, even if that room now had a new name – the datacentre. But these were different environments. Capacity could scale with demand. Services could be tested, refined and deployed continuously. Organisations moved from long planning cycles to rapid iteration.
The data explosion and the rise of AI
Convergence also drove a dramatic expansion in data. Smartphones, video and connected services generated continuous streams of behavioural and contextual information. Social media grew from this and soon became the dominant user experience. Data stopped being something collected occasionally for reports and became something produced constantly as a byproduct of everyday activity.
Which brings me to the latest disruption – artificial intelligence (AI).
AI exploded into public consciousness in 2022 with the release of ChatGPT. There was a long history of research and early implementation before that moment, but it was the concurrence of vast data volumes, elastic computing power, the proliferation of ever-more-capable processors, and truly global platforms that turned what had once been constrained into something that now appears poised to change everything.
From IT to digital: a shift in language, a shift in kind
“Information technology” described systems managed by specialists in special places. “Digital” describes something far more pervasive – the integration of technology into everyday life, work and society. Technology is no longer a function. It is an environment.
I have been fortunate to witness, and occasionally to help shape, that journey. From guarded rooms to personal devices. From isolated systems to global platforms. From static tools to adaptive intelligence.
So, has tech escaped the machine room?
Yes. And no.
Everyone now carries digital technology in their hands, every day, everywhere. But every one of those devices is connected to the new machine rooms – vast, hyperscale datacentres that would be unrecognisable to the specialists who guarded their predecessors, yet entirely familiar in purpose.
The machine room didn’t disappear. It just got much, much bigger, and the rest of the world moved in around it.
Julian David is CEO of TechUK.
