1983
UK Government Launches the Alvey Programme

The Alvey Programme was a British government sponsored research program in information technology that ran from 1983 to 1987. The program was a reaction to the Japanese Fifth generation Computer Project.

Focus areas for the Alvey Programme included:

• VLSI (very large scale integration) technology for microelectronics
• Intelligent Knowledge Based Systems (IKBS) or Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Software Engineering
• Man-Machine Interface (included Natural Language Processing)
• Systems Architecture (for parallel processing)

Leaps in computer hardware technology have been defined by generation:

• 1st Generation: computers using vacuum tubes;
• 2nd Generation: computers using transistors and diodes;
• 3rd Generation: computers using integrated circuits;
• 4th Generation: computers using microprocessors.

Whereas previous computer generations had focused on increasing the number of logic elements in a single CPU, the fifth generation, it was widely believed at the time, would instead turn to massive numbers of CPUs, running in parallel, for added performance.