Royal Signals and Radar Establishment

The Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE) was a scientific research establishment within the Ministry of Defence of the United Kingdom, located primarily at Malvern in Worcestershire. It was formed in 1976 in an amalgamation of earlier research establishments including the Royal Radar Establishment (RRE), itself derived from the World War II-era Telecommunications Research Establishment. In 1979 it merged with the Services Electronic Research Laboratory (SERL) formerly at Baldock and the Signals Research and Development Establishment (SRDE) formerly at Christchurch. There were out-stations at the ex-RAF airfields at Defford and Pershore.

In April 1991 RSRE amalgamated with other defence research establishments to form the Defence Research Agency, which in April 1995 amalgamated with more organisations to form the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency. In June 2001 this became independent of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) with approximately two thirds being incorporated into a commercial company, QinetiQ, owned by the MoD and the remainder into the fully government owned laboratory, DSTL. In 2003, the Carlyle Group bought a private equity stake (~30%) in QinetiQ.

Some of the most important technologies developed from work at RSRE are radar, thermal imaging, liquid crystal displays and speech synthesis.

Contributions to computer science made by the RSRE included ALGOL 68RS (a portable implementation of ALGOL 68, following on from ALGOL 68R developed by RRE), RBF networks, the VIPER high integrity microprocessor, the ELLA hardware description language, and the TenDRA C/C++ compiler.

The RSRE motto was Ubique Sentio (latin for I sense everywhere).