It had been our policy from the outset to try to make our work relevant to the needs of industry, and many of our student projects derived from industrial needs. In 1968 both Edinburgh and ourselves competed successfully for grants from the Wolfson Foundation for resources which would enable us to offer our expertise to industry – on a commercial basis – in any electronics fields in which we had special competence. Our Wolfson unit, led by Tony Dorey (who subsequently left us to go to a Chair in the University of Lancaster) was modestly successful, but Industry was facing many problems at that time and our success was not as great as we would have wished.

University-Industry collaboration was being heavily encouraged at that time by the then Ministry of Technology, which in 1966 published the “Bosworth Report” under the title “Graduate Training in Manufacturing Technology”. That report encouraged initiatives in various industrial sectors, aiming to produce better trained industrial staff through schemes involving both a university based component and a period of integrated industrial experience.

The first round of schemes produced four such initiatives, one of which, for the semiconductor industry, was based on collaboration between our Department and the Mullard factory in Millbrook (a suburb of Southampton). Graduates were nominated by their employers to take part in a 16 month MSc course in Microelectronics and Semiconductor Technology. They spent three terms at the university, followed by 6 months on a group project in the Mullard factory, where they had their own set of equipment for designing, fabricating and assessing silicon integrated circuits. It was in some ways a complicated formula to get right, but we embarked on it in high hopes. The first course started in 1968 and ran successfully with about a dozen graduates, but then doubts set in on the industrial side. There were two reasons for this: first the highly competitive nature of the various firms we sought to serve led to concerns about their own commercial security (not least Mullards who were providing the industrial training base) and, secondly, financial pressures were then such that firms had become reluctant to release candidates for the course when they could remain “productively” employed at home.

We were proud to have been selected to spearhead the Bosworth concept and saddened that, after so much effort had been devoted to it, it had to be abandoned after only three years. Much of the effort that produced the initial success was provided by Greville Bloodworth and Henri Kemhadjian. Greville was later to found a new and very successful Department of Electronics in the University of York, whilst Henri was to gain a Chair and become Head of Department in Southampton. As I shall reflect in a slightly different context later, the Department was very much alive, but the industry seemed to be lacking in its own “will to live”.

Nonetheless, during the period we ran many short courses in the new technologies for industry both at home and abroad, as well as playing a significant part in national committees intended to make the new technologies better known and adopted. Again many of these committees, including one intended to interest the defence establishments and another to rationalise an over-fragmented inward looking industry, achieved little success at the time. It has to be accepted that the times were not financially propitious for change, but the biggest problem was an innate conservatism that was not conducive to looking to the new technologies of the future.