Mannerisms

There's a proliferation of new companies. Everyone in the West Country is talking about so-and-so's new start-up, or what so-and-so might be planning for his next start-up.

Every time you go there's new, usually odd, names: Zimiti, Twinlinx, Deltenna, Air, Audium.

No one has been more responsible for this phenomenon than Professor David May, FRS, architect of the Inmos Transputer, Professor of Computer Science at Bristol University and Co-Founder and CTO of XMOS Semiconductor.

"Bristol is an immensely creative city", says May, "a place where a lot of these foot-loose, creative people come."

May came to Bristol in 1978, the year that Inmos was founded, and recruited its design team.

"We were a young group", says May, "now all those people are about 50 years old. We were the training ground for a whole generation of electronics design and software engineers."

In 1978, there was virtually no hi-tec venture capital industry in the UK and it took more than a decade and a half for that to change.

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"In 1995 the VC industry changed in the UK and start-ups became possible and, in the years since then, we've started to see a number of start-ups," says May. Most of them were founded by Inmos people.

Bristol's connection with the semiconductor industry had started long before, in the 1960s, with Fairchild's design centre in Bristol. Then a bunch of large semiconductor companies, including STMicroelectronics and Infineon, set up in the area helping it to evolve into what it is today - the largest agglomeration of chip designers in Europe.

But the South-West silicon nexus lacks something.

When Silicon Valley went through its period of  most frenetic start-up activity in the 1960s and 1970s, it had a watering hole, an established venue for information exchange, job searches and gossip: The Wagon Wheel.

In Bristol's oldest pub, The Hatchet, last week, I asked PicoChip founder and  COO Peter Claydon, which of the multifarious local hostelries  might be a suitable West Country Mecca for the technology industry.

Without a second's hesitation he replied: 'The Reckless Engineer'.

Named after Britain's greatest engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who took legendary financial and technological risks, The Reckless Engineer is near Bristol's Temple Meads station.

That sounds right.