LEO pioneer dies

David Caminer, a Pioneer in Computers, Dies at 92

Excerpts:

Lyons was the first company in the world to computerize its commercial operations, partly because it had so many of them: it had more than 200 teahouses in London and its suburbs, with each Lyons Corner House daily generating thousands of paper receipts and needing scores of fresh baked items.

In addition to running the tea shops, Lyons catered large events like tennis at Wimbledon and garden parties at Windsor Castle; it also operated hotels, laundries, and ice cream, candy and meat pie companies. And, of course, tea plantations.

As a result, the company required exceptionally efficient office support. So it was only natural it would look at the “electronic brains” that scientists in the United States were developing for scientific and military purposes as a way to streamline its own empire. Mr. Caminer’s role was finding ways to retain traditional clerical rigor while speeding up the company’s logistics and finances many times over.

The result was LEO, its name derived from Lyons Electronic Office. The Economist magazine called it “the first dedicated business machine to operate on the ‘stored program principle,’ meaning that it could be quickly reconfigured to perform different tasks by loading a new program.”

“LEO’s early success owed less to its hardware than to its highly innovative systems-oriented approach to programming, devised and led by David Caminer,” Computer Weekly said last year.

LEO performed its first calculation on Nov. 17, 1951, running a program to evaluate costs, prices and margins of that week’s baked output. At that moment, Lyons was years ahead of I.B.M. and the other computer giants that eventually overtook it.


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Mr. Caminer has been called the first corporate electronic systems analyst, a designation with which Mr. Ceruzzi agreed.

The finished LEO, which had less than 100,000th the power of a current PC, could calculate an employee’s pay in 1.5 seconds, a job that took an experienced clerk eight minutes. Its success led Lyons to set up a computer subsidiary that later developed two more generations of LEO, the last with transistors, rather than the noisy vacuum tubes used in the first two models.

LEOs were sold to the Ford Motor Company, tobacco companies, a steel maker, South Africa, Australia, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, among other buyers. When the British government chose the last LEO to handle its telephone billing system, Tony Benn, postmaster general, praised Lyons for “standing up to and beating on its own merits” the competition from overseas.



Wikipedia: The British LEO I (Lyons Electronic Office I)

Excerpt:

J. Lyons and Co., one of the UK's leading catering and food manufacturing companies in the first half of the 20th century, sent two of its senior managers to the USA in 1947 to look at new business methods developed during the Second World War. During their visit they came across digital computers then used exclusively for engineering and mathematical computations. They saw the potential of computers to help solve the problem of administering a major business enterprise. They also learned that Cambridge University, back in the UK, was actually building such a machine, the pioneering EDSAC computer.

On their return to company headquarters in London they made a recommendation to the Lyons' Board that Lyons should acquire or build a computer to meet their business needs. This was accepted, and it was agreed that Cambridge University should receive some financial support if the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory gave some help to the Lyons' initiative.

Cambridge provided training and support for the Lyons' engineers. By 1949 they had the basics of a computer specifically designed for business data processing running and on 17 November 1951 rolled out the first commercial business application. The computer was called the LEO—Lyons Electronic Office.


LEO Computers Society


Comment: I know quite a bit about computing history, but today was my introduction to LEO!