A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Teashops and the World's First Office Computer

  • Georgina Ferry
Fourth Estate: 2003. 240 pp. £15.99

At first glance it seems astonishing that a company known mainly for operating cafes that served tea and cakes in Britain should not only have installed the first ever computer for business applications, but should also have built it. But as Georgina Ferry makes clear in this book, it wasn't really so surprising because J. Lyons & Co. had become, under the leadership of John Simmons, a pioneer in the application of technology to management in the years before the Second World War.

It was therefore natural that two senior Lyons employees, Raymond Thompson and Oliver Standingford, should have been sent to the United States in 1947 to study recent developments in office automation and to learn what they could about ENIAC (the Electronic Numeric Integrator and Computer), which had just been completed at the University of Pennsylvania. (ENIAC was not the first electronic computer — the Colossus of Britain's Bletchley Park deserves that accolade. However, Colossus was designed for a special purpose, codebreaking, and was still a secret in 1947. Indeed, even in the late 1970s, I could not find a British author to write an article on Colossus for an encyclopaedia that I was editing because it was still covered by the Official Secrets Act.)

Thompson and Standingford returned to Britain imbued with the potential of computers for business management. They had learned that, in the United States, only the Prudential Insurance Company was thinking along similar lines. In late 1947 the pair visited the University of Cambridge, where Maurice Wilkes was building the EDSAC (the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator), and they knew they had found what they needed. Although EDSAC had been designed with scientific and engineering calculations in mind, they believed that its design could be adapted to Lyons' needs.

Mane frame? LEO, the first business computer, was set up and run by J. Lyons & Co., which operated a chain of tea shops in Britain.

How this could be done wasn't at all obvious. Most scientific applications tended to be 'compute-bound' — lots of computing and little input or output — whereas business or data-processing applications tended to be 'input/output bound', with lots of input and output but very little computing. Could a computer intended for the former be adapted for the latter? The Lyons management convinced themselves that it could, although serious problems with input and output bedevilled the LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) project for much of its lifetime.

LEO was, essentially, a copy of the EDSAC with a few hardware innovations and some limited software advances. Its main claim to fame is in the applications area. On 29 November 1951, LEO ran the first ever business application, a program to calculate the value of Lyons' output of bread, cakes and pies. This was long before any similar application in the United States, Prudential's use of computers having been delayed by hardware problems. Over the following years, LEO took over much of Lyons' data-processing work, and was used for some non-Lyons applications, including various defence-related calculations. When LEO executed defence programs, the Official Secrets Act required it to be encircled by red tape, with only authorized personnel allowed near the computer.

It was particularly quixotic of Lyons not only to build and install their own machine but also to go into the business of building and selling computers to others. An updated version, LEO II, still used valves; LEO III was redesigned to incorporate semiconductor technology. Ten LEO IIs were delivered to customers between 1957 and 1961, and 61 LEO IIIs were sold, mainly from 1962 to 1966. By then, the manufacturing and marketing power of US companies, particularly IBM, was severely impairing the ability of Lyons to compete as an independent manufacturer of computers. In 1963, Leo Computers was merged with — but effectively taken over by — the computer division of English Electric, in the first of a series of mergers that eventually led to the creation of the last major British computer company, International Computers Ltd.

The story of LEO has already been told in two more technical books: LEO: The First Business Computer by Peter Bird (Hasler, 1994) and LEO: The Incredible Story of the World's First Business Computer by David Caminer et al. (McGraw-Hill, 1997); further information can be found on the web at http://www.leo-computers.org.uk. But Georgina Ferry tells the story well, with less technical detail but with nice capsule histories of the development of computing in Britain and the United States, particularly in the decade after the end of the Second World War. Her book is rather more accessible to the general reader than the others, and is a good read for anyone interested in LEO or, more generally, in postwar computing in Britain.