A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Tea Shops and the world’s first office computer

A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Tea Shops and the world’s first office computer
Georgina Ferry

The eccentric story of one of the most bizarre marriages in the history of British business: the invention of the world's first office computer and the Lyons Teashop.The Lyons teashops were one of the great British institutions, providing a cup of tea and a penny bun through the depression and the war, though to the 1970s. Yet Lyons also has a more surprising claim to history.In the 1930s John Simmons, a young maths graduate in charge of the clerks' offices, had a dream: to build a machine that would automate the millions of tedious transactions and process them in as little time as possible. Simmons' quest for the first office computer – the Lyons Electronic Office – would take 20 years and involve some of the most brilliant young minds in Britain.Interwoven with the story of creating LEO is the story of early computing, from the Difference Engine of Charles Babbage to the codecracking computers at Bletchley Park and the instantly obsolescent ENIAC in the US. It is also the story of post war British computer business: why did it lose the initiative? Why did the US succeed while British design was often superior?

A Computer Called LEO

Lyons Teashops and the World’sFirst Office Computer

GEORGINA FERRY

Contents

Cover (#u7a3a10ec-df27-5e6f-a52b-f898fe1a3a64)

Title Page (#u46915dae-c395-5a12-a949-ba6c653c38a5)

Preface (#u514630c6-ee2b-5040-91f4-e0e7491c5124)

1 A Mission to Manage (#u1b47867c-5260-52ee-9e79-9f139100b754)

2 The Electronic Brain (#u1aa744cb-8b9e-5c58-8215-f90a3392e6bb)

3 Made in Britain (#ud74fa228-c33c-5687-a1aa-4405e818ef04)

4 A Computer for Lyons (#litres_trial_promo)

5 LEO goes to work (#litres_trial_promo)

6 In Business (#litres_trial_promo)

7 Leo’s Last Roar (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Sources (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features … (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Profile of Georgina Ferry (#litres_trial_promo)

Snapshot (#litres_trial_promo)

Top Ten Favourite Books (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Book (#litres_trial_promo)

A Critical Eye (#litres_trial_promo)

Imagining the Future (#litres_trial_promo)

Read On (#litres_trial_promo)

Have You Read? (#litres_trial_promo)

If You Loved This You’ll Like … (#litres_trial_promo)

Find Out More (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Preface (#ulink_65c9293d-f53c-5c44-a0ea-03f4a80fcd82)

MEET THE £150,000 ROBOT THAT KNOWS ALL THE ANSWERS.

Puzzled? LEO the Brain Will Do Your Thinking For You.

Robots have begun taking over work which is too complicated or too laborious for human beings. In cold print this may seem fanciful. But now one is confronted by LEO, Britain’s new electronic brain … He is the only one of his kind on commercial work in the world.

Evening News, 16 February 1954

What is there in a name? Plenty if it is LEO, for it is a name coined at the dawn of computer technology, that has carried with it a long list of first achievements. For that reason alone it merits perpetuation.

Engineering, 5 March 1965

To some, it was a supreme irrelevance, a quixotic venture into the unknown by a respectable family business that ought to have known better. To others, it was an enterprise of boldness and vision, whose ultimate failure resulted from the conservatism and short-sightedness of others, and whose story contains lessons that succeeding generations would do well to learn.

LEO was a computer. It burst into the British public consciousness through a snowstorm of popular articles in February 1954, although its genesis lay some years earlier. It was not the first computer in the world, by any of a number of possible definitions. As a piece of electronic engineering it was not fundamentally original. LEO and its creators deserve their place in history not because of what it was but because of what it did. For LEO was the first computer in the world to be harnessed to the task of managing a business. That business was J. Lyons & Co., renowned the length and breadth of the land for its fine tea and cakes, available in grocers’ shops everywhere but savoured especially in the Lyons teashops, a chain of more than two hundred high street cafés.

LEO was designed and built by Lyons’s own engineers, and its first programs were written by Lyons managers before the computer programmer existed as a job description. At the time, the few who knew anything about computers thought of them as tools for scientists and mathematicians. LEO was a novelty in that its circuits hummed not with non-linear equations but with the hours worked and rates of pay for the bakers who produced, among other things, 36 miles of Swiss roll per day. Rather than calculating missile trajectories (though it could do that, too), LEO grappled with the task of restocking each teashop every day with no more and no less than it needed to keep its customers supplied with bread rolls, boiled beef and ice cream. It even turned its attention to ensuring that Lyons continued to produce the perfect blends of tea on which so much of the company’s reputation rested.

Fifty years later it is hard to imagine a time when the computerisation of such activities was remarkable or even revolutionary. Today we use computers not only for all forms of record-keeping and financial management but to go shopping, to teach children, to fly aeroplanes (and to write books). They have become an extension of more or less every human cognitive capacity, and invaded every area of human activity. Off-the-shelf software packages have removed the need to understand how computers work or to speak their language – instead it is we who are programmed to point and click. But to reach this point we had to start somewhere, and LEO was in at the beginning.

LEO’s development brought about the convergence of two histories that until that point had been quite separate: the history of computers, and the history of office management and office machines. In this it anticipated by at least five years IBM, a giant of the office machines business in the first half of the twentieth century but a relative latecomer to commercial computers. LEO’s creators were acutely conscious of their pioneering role, and were not slow to exploit the opportunities of their position. Soon after LEO’s first public debut, with several applications running successfully on a single machine and interest building from outside the company, Lyons set up a subsidiary called Leo Computers Ltd, with the intention of manufacturing computers for sale to other businesses.

A background in catering is not normally seen as an obvious qualification for high-tech start-up companies, and Leo’s later history showed that many potential customers and others found this hard to swallow. They made the mistake of judging Lyons by its best-known products: cake-making was seen as a light and fluffy enterprise, a far cry from the sparks and sinews of electronic engineering.

Nevertheless, the advantage gained simply by being first in the field meant that for a brief period in the late 1950s Leo Computers Ltd was one of the leading computer manufacturers and computing consultancies in Britain, if not the world. That shining moment of glory was achieved by a small group of individuals whose vision of what computers could achieve – and how to manage them so that they fulfilled their potential – showed a creative imagination unmatched in their time by those running any other business. Their story has now been all but forgotten, except by those who participated directly and the slightly wider circle of computer history buffs. As we move into a world in which it seems there is no business that is not e-business, it seems timely to look again at how it was that technology, commerce and management converged in a British catering firm to produce the world’s first business computer.