Remembering LEO

Abstract

Abstract.It is now more than 60 years since the world's first business use of a computer, the valuation of bakery output, was rolled-out on the LEO I computer at Cadby Hall in London, the headquarters of the food production and catering company J. Lyons and Company. LEO I had been designed and built as a computer to be used for business data processing by a team of engineers recruited by Lyons, with a basic design following the design of the Cambridge University EDSAC. The story of the Lyons initiative has been recorded and explanations of how a company in the food business came to build a computer has been told in books and articles in the last decades (-see Appendix 1 for a comprehensive bibliography of material relating to LEO). This chapter remembers the contribution made by LEO. Keywords: Business computers, J. Lyons and Company, LEO.The late David Caminer passionately wanted the world to be reminded of the LEO heritage. He had been instrumental in setting up and managing the LEO programming and systems function (Aris 2000, Ferry 2012. He felt that J. Lyons and the LEO team had played an important role in what is now taken for granted -the use of computers in society for a wide range of activities other than mathematical calculations. And he was concerned because it seemed to him that the part played by LEO had been written out of the histories of computing then being published -the 1980s and later, and that as a result there was only a very limited memory of the LEO legacy. A good example is that the 875 page Concise Encyclopaedia of Computer Science (Reilly 2004), intended as a reference book for students, devotes half a sentence to LEO in Appendix III on page 832. The UK's Professor Martin Campbell-Kelly, one of the world's leading computer historians, in his History of the Software Industry (Campbell-Kelly, 2003) makes no mention of LEO and little of British software despite the pioneering achievements of LEO and other British companies, concentrating largely on American initiatives. He writes, (page 10), "... I probably have a better knowledge of the British software industry than of the American. However, I felt unable to incorporate much material on the British software industry because it would have appeared disproportionate, would have appeared chauvinistic". Such modesty can lead to the making of myths.It was David Caminer who, supported by a small group of old enthusiastic LEO hands, was determined to ensure that the legacy of LEO would be written into computer history. Independently Peter Bird, the ex-head of Systems Development at Remembering LEO 23 J. Lyons & Company Limited, had long thought it was important for the LEO story to be part of computer history, and over a number of years, working very much on his own, had compiled a history of the LEO project, which apart from the historical narrative included much technical and personal detail. To publish the book he even set up his own publishing company, and in 1994 published 'LEO: The First Business Computer' (Bird 1994).It was in his later...

Information Systems History: What is History? What is is History? What is History? … and Why Even Bother with History?

“…One way is by the collection of Oral Histories, and the IFIP Working Group 9.7, concerned with Computer History, has recently sponsored a book edited by its chairman Tatnal (2012). A chapter entitled 'Remembering LEO' sets out some of the ways the IS community can record both old and contemporary history (Land, 2012). If we regard history as a valuable resource for the study and understanding of IS then as a community we must be much more systematic in ensuring that the student of the future has the available historical resource we can create.…”

“…One of the reasons for the current vogue is that many of those associated with the earliest days of IS and computer-based systems are now mature in years and offer a rich, but inevitably dwindling, resource of insight and wisdom. One of our number, Frank Land, embodies both the academic and the commercial foundations of IS, and to an extent it is his recent calls for further attention to be paid to these histories that has resulted in these special issues (Land, 2010(Land, , 2012.…”