Divided by a common language

One of the perennial problems with computers is that, although we here in the UK have a strong claim to have invented them, they are dominated by American culture, and in particular by American spellings. When I create these posts, for example, the spell-checker constantly queries my spelling of words like "colour", "centre", "defence" and so on. The worst problem I ever had was with a program I had written for work in BASIC (which, for anyone who doesn't know, is a simple programming language). It just wouldn't work properly, and I couldn't for the life of me find out why. It took me over five hours of de-bugging to come up with the answer - in one line I had called the random number generator by using the command RANDOMISE. Except of course that BASIC didn't recognise it, because I should have used the American spelling RANDOMIZE. I think the short and pithy word I used when I eventually discovered this is spelled the same both sides of the Atlantic! Program(me) by the way is another word we spell differently, except that it has now become accepted over here that spelled the American way - without the final "me" it means a computer program, whereas if you are referring to a TV or theatre programme, for example, you use the British spelling.