Nor has this been a purely American phenomenon. Work by Jones-Evans and Westhead (1996) showed how in the late 1980s the total stock of small high-technology firms in the UK had increased sharply and such firms had increased their share of high-technology employment, at a time when large high-technology firms were losing employment. The reason for this growth was primarily an increase in the number of high-technology services firms. Much of the growth was through an increase in the number of computer services firms, reflecting advances in computing and the spread of computing applications to more specialist applications.