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?
One of the fascinations of technology is its power to transform but it can also, when implemented badly, ruin lives.
Technology brought major changes to my own working life. In my early years in journalism, research would involve going into a newspaper’s cuttings library where articles were cut and pasted, with scissors and glue, onto A4 paper, filed into subject areas and booked out to reporters. When the cuttings pointed to a different name or subject, I’d head back to the library. Now the world’s cuttings are available on my phone.
When I left newspapers for the BBC Radio newsroom, one of the main pieces of journalistic technology was the typewriter. I and other journalists would, in our turn, dictate an hourly news bulletin to a typist – such were the rules.
I would give typed A4 sheets to an irritated newsreader, sometimes a minute or two before a bulletin was due to go to air and listen in awe as they read the text smoothly despite a mass of penned changes. Today’s BBC technology means there are no journalists like me shortening the lives of newsreaders.
After the BBC, when I became fascinated in the world of business technology, a natural step was to join the computer press. Then I discovered failing technology projects, which were usually accompanied by denial and misinformation.
The biggest debacle was the Post Office IT scandal. My colleague Rebecca Thomson rightly received an OBE for her investigation that exposed the scandal. Computer Weekly’s Karl Flinders would receive one too for his many exposes if the stars were to align. The scandal led to the ruin of hundreds and possibly thousands of lives.
Chinook scandal
A lesser-known scandal today goes back as far as 1985, that of an upgraded RAF Chinook helicopter that the pilots did not want to fly, in part because its new bug-ridden “Fadec” engine software could cause a loss of control.
David Harrison, a reporter on Channel Four News, brought me into the story by asking for my take on the Chinook’s computer problems.
Such was the density of bugs in the Chinook’s Fadec software that defence contractor EDS (later acquired by HP) gave up testing the software after finding 486 anomalies in only 18% of the code.
When in 1994 two pilots asked to fly a pre-Fadec version of the helicopter for a short flight from Northern Ireland to the Mull of Kintyre, their request was refused. Flight Lieutenants Rick Cook and Jonathan Tapper, the pilots, followed orders and took off in a Fadec-equipped helicopter they knew was dangerous to fly. They died, along with two other crew and 25 VIPs who were leading intelligence specialists. It was one of the RAF’s worst peacetime accidents.
Tapper left a baby son and his second child was born six weeks after his death. Cook left a daughter of about two.
Subsequently, two air marshals found the two pilots grossly negligent. It meant the RAF and Ministry of Defence had disengaged from accountability over the Fadec problems.
But the fathers and many others knew there was no objective evidence that the Chinook was under control when it hit the landmass of the Mull of Kintyre. Much of the helicopter was destroyed in a fireball. There was no black box.
Untruths told
At a Parliamentary hearing, the Ministry of Defence briefed the then defence secretary that the problem with the Chinook’s Fadec was not the design or bugs but EDS’s use of the wrong tool to test the code, which was untrue.
I knew from covering IT project failures in central departments that Whitehall officials could be creative in their briefings to ministers. But I was surprised at the extent of the untruths that became the official narrative after the Mull of Kintyre crash.
“Such is the everyday secrecy within Whitehall, some of which is justified but mostly is not, that the truth is instinctively hidden when IT-based projects begin to fail”
Tony Collins
I had the advantage at Computer Weekly of a freedom to investigate. Off and on, I spent several years on the story, writing numerous pieces. I came to regard the pilots’ fathers as friends and sometimes would speak to Mike Tapper, Jonathan’s father, several times a week. I went to his home in Norfolk. We’d talk about what could have gone wrong in his son’s last five minutes of life. There were many possible scenarios.
The Chinook’s unit test pilot Squadron Leader Robert Burke patiently explained to me every major part of a Chinook helicopter, in its original and upgraded versions.
RAF Justice
With his help, and that of Mike Tapper and John Cook – Rick’s father who was a former Concorde pilot – and after receiving many leaked Fadec-related memos, RAF emails and internal reports, Computer Weekly was able to publish a 140-page award-winning expose RAF Justice – How the Royal Air Force blamed two dead pilots and covered up problems with the Chinook’s computer system Fadec.
Our report was publicised nationally and contributed, in a minor way, to various Parliamentary inquiries and debates on whether the RAF was right to blame the pilots. We received about 400 emails. Nearly 90 MPs signed an Early Day Motion calling for an investigation into our report.
Pilots cleared
Seventeen years on, the pilots’ names were cleared but today the families of the passengers continue to seek justice. They want to know why the RAF allowed a dangerously unsafe Chinook to go into service. Why were their loved ones put aboard a single aircraft? Did the RAF put VIPs aboard the upgraded Chinook to prove its critics wrong? Did four crew and 25 passengers die because the RAF wanted to prove a point?
It’s odd that the current government and the Ministry of Defence have sealed internal papers on the crash for 100 years. Families are right to ask, what is there to hide?
One of the most influential Chinook campaigners was James Arbuthnot – then an MP, now a peer – who went on to become a key figure in the mitigation of injustices after the Post Office IT scandal.
He was kind enough to invite me to the House of Commons in 2011 where campaigners and families of the pilots watched from the gallery as the then defence secretary announced that the finding of gross negligence against the pilots was being set aside.
Afterwards TV cameras filmed the reaction of the families. It was a credit to the families that they’d stuck with the campaign for 17 years. For the offspring of the pilots, the stigma of disgrace had been erased from their fathers’ reputation.
But rumour has it that the government had a struggle to clear the pilots’ names amid opposition from defence chiefs.
Health service IT covered up before it began
Another technology scandal that ruined lives and where official misinformation continued for years was on the failing £10bn National Programme for IT in the NHS. A Whitehall cover-up was underway before the project began.
It took years for Computer Weekly to obtain Downing Street papers where a meeting chaired by then prime minister Tony Blair approved the NHS IT programme. Unsurprisingly, the meeting had no discussion of the risks, which is consistent with Whitehall’s “good news” agenda. I am grateful that an internal Whitehall report on the risks was leaked to us. But the fact remains that the Downing Street meeting approved a multibillion-pound IT programme without knowing those risks.
For three years, solicitors for the Cabinet Office opposed my request for the Downing Street papers to be released. They said, “Disclosure of the information may disrupt the proper consideration of NHS IT projects in coming years”.
Such was Whitehall’s pushback to our coverage of the project’s problems that a health minister, based on her briefings, criticised me by name in a House of Commons debate on the NHS IT programme. I took it as a sign our coverage was having an influence.
Barred from press conference
At another point in the programme, officials went as far as barring me from a technology press conference at the Department of Health’s headquarters in Whitehall. As I went to use my electronic pass to enter a large room where the press conference was due to be held, an official sped down a wide staircase, ran over to the electronic turnstiles and stood in front of me, stopping me from entering the room. I took out my recorder and asked in a friendly way what was happening. Staring at my recorder, he said not a word and escorted me politely out of the building. He remained silent throughout.
It was clear the Department of Health didn’t want their showcasing of new technology to be undermined by Computer Weekly’s questions about why some hospitals were refusing to install expensive and over-specified central systems that didn’t fit with local needs.
A House of Lords committee later asked me to go before peers and explain what happened at the “barring” press conference. Looking back, I was pleased in a way that the Department of Health had, at least, been open about wanting its one-sided “good news” agenda to prevail.
Indeed, pushback over our coverage of failing IT-based programmes was almost to be expected. Such is the everyday secrecy within Whitehall, some of which is justified but mostly is not, that the truth is instinctively hidden when IT-based projects begin to fail.
That’s where investigative and campaigning journalism can be useful in opening up the other side of the story and, we hope, help prevent future disasters.
I was, indeed, grateful for wider media coverage. BBC and Channel Four documentaries, as well as the FT and other national newspapers, picked up our pieces and I was asked to help present a BBC2 prime-time technology programme, The Net, which focused on specific IT projects.
In the pre-Zoom era, Radio 4’s Today programme regularly dispatched a BBC car to collect a Computer Weekly reporter for a live studio interview on an article we’d published.
But we were not always successful.
We went to the High Court to support the Information Commissioner in seeking more openness on technology projects, but creatively minded government lawyers cited the 1689 Bill of Rights in defence of continued Whitehall secrecy. Indeed, an institutional closed mind still exists, as do the IT-based project failures. Today, a replacement emergency services radio and data communications system is billions over budget and many years behind schedule.
Campaigning journalism
Investigative and campaigning journalism was also uncomfortable at times. A colleague, John Riley, and I went before a House of Commons committee to argue – successfully – for an independent report on a troubled air traffic control system at Swanwick in Hampshire. I haven’t forgotten that the chair of the committee, the wonderful Gwyneth Dunwoody MP, asked me during the hearing to explain my careless use of the word “descoping”.
“That is a jargon word,” I replied, embarrassed.
“Yes,” said Dunwoody, “but if we could stick to English some of us would find it simpler.”
Did my 21 years at Computer Weekly have an impact?
It’s difficult to say. I didn’t really regard it as a job. I was used to the evenings, weekends and holidays blending into the working week. I remember doing a live BBC Radio 2 interview from a phone box in Lyme Regis.
But none of this is as memorable as the day-to-day working with great teams of reporters, news editors, sub-editors and editors.
I’ve been a journalist at various places since my early 20s but the warmth and professionalism of the people I worked with at Computer Weekly was unmatched. Since I left the magazine, it has only increased its influence.
Tony Collins was executive editor at Computer Weekly from 1989 to 2010.
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