LEO (computer)

J. Lyons and Co. was one of the UK's leading catering and food manufacturing companies in the first half of the 20th century. In 1947, two of its senior managers, Oliver Standingford and Raymond Thompson, were sent to the United States to look at new business methods developed during World War II. During the visit, they met Herman Goldstine who was one of the original developers of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer. Standingford and Thompson saw the potential of computers to help solve the problem of administering a major business enterprise. They also learned from Goldstine that, back in the UK, Douglas Hartree and Maurice Wilkes were actually building another such machine, the pioneering EDSAC computer, at the University of Cambridge.[1]

On their return to the UK, Standingford and Thompson visited Hartree and Wilkes in Cambridge and were favourably impressed with their technical expertise and vision. Hartree and Wilkes estimated that EDSAC was 12–18 months from completion, but said that this interval could be shortened by additional funding. Standingford and Thompson wrote a report to the Lyons' board recommending that Lyons should acquire or build a computer to meet their business needs. The board agreed that, as a first step, Lyons would provide Hartree and Wilkes with £2,500 for the EDSAC project, and would also provide them with the services of a Lyons electrical engineer, Ernest Lenaerts. EDSAC was completed and ran its first program in May 1949.[2]

Following the successful completion of EDSAC, the Lyons board agreed to start the construction of their own machine, expanding on the EDSAC design. The LEO computer room, which took up around 2,500 square feet of floor space, was at Cadby Hall in Hammersmith.[3]

The Lyons machine was christened Lyons Electronic Office, or LEO. On the recommendation of Wilkes, Lyons recruited John Pinkerton, a radar engineer and research student at Cambridge, as team leader for the project. Lenaerts returned to Lyons to work on the project, and Wilkes provided training for Lyons' engineer Derek Hemy, who would be responsible for writing LEO's programs. On 15 February 1951 the computer, carrying out a simple test program, was shown to HRH Princess Elizabeth.[4] The first business application to be run on LEO was Bakery Valuations, which computed the costs of ingredients used in bread and cakes.[5] This was successfully run on 5 September 1951,[4] and LEO took over Bakery Valuations calculations completely on 29–30 November 1951.[6][4]

Mary Coombs was employed in 1952 as the first female programmer to work on LEO, and as such she is recognized as the first female commercial programmer.[7][8][9][10][11]

Five files of archive material on the LEO Computer patent are held at the British Library and can be accessed through the British Library Archives catalogue.[12]

LEO I's clock speed was 500 kHz, with most instructions taking about 1.5 ms to execute.[13][14][15] To be useful for business applications, the computer had to be able to handle a number of data streams, input and output, simultaneously. Therefore, its chief designer, John Pinkerton, designed the machine to have multiple input/output buffers. In the first instance, these were linked to fast paper tape readers and punches, fast punched card readers and punches, and a 100 line a minute tabulator. Later, other devices, including magnetic tape, were added. Its ultrasonic delay-line memory based on tanks of mercury, with 2K (2048) 35-bit words (i.e., 83⁄4 kilobytes), was four times as large as that of EDSAC. The systems analysis was carried out by David Caminer.[16]

A circuit board from a LEO III computer

Lyons used LEO I initially for valuation jobs, but its role was extended to include payroll, inventory, and so on. One of its early tasks was the elaboration of daily orders which were phoned in every afternoon by the shops and used to calculate the overnight production requirements, assembly instructions, delivery schedules, invoices, costings, and management reports. This was the first instance of an integrated management information system.[17] The LEO project was also a pioneer in outsourcing: in 1956, Lyons started doing the payroll calculations for Ford UK and others on the LEO I machine. The success of this led to the company dedicating one of its LEO II machines to bureau services. Later, the system was used for scientific computations as well. Met Office staff used a LEO I before the Met Office bought its own computer, a Ferranti Mercury, in 1959.[18]

In 1954, with the decision to proceed with LEO II and interest from other commercial companies, Lyons formed LEO Computers Ltd.

The first LEO III was completed in 1961; it was a solid-state machine with a 13.2 μs cycle time ferrite core memory.[19] It was microprogrammed and was controlled by a multitasking "Master program" operating system, which allowed concurrent running of as many as 12 application programs.

Users of LEO computers programmed in two coding languages: Intercode,[20] a low-level assembler type language; and CLEO (acronym: Clear Language for Expressing Orders), the COBOL equivalent.[21]

One of the features that LEO III shared with many computers of the day was a loudspeaker connected to the central processor via a divide by 100 circuit and an amplifier which enabled operators to tell whether a program was looping by the distinctive sound it made.[22] Another quirk was that many intermittent faults were due to faulty connectors and could be temporarily fixed by briskly strumming the card handles.

Some LEO III machines purchased in the mid-to-late 1960s remained in commercial use at GPO Telephones, the forerunner of British Telecom, until 1981, primarily producing telephone bills.[5][19] They were kept running using parts from redundant LEOs purchased by the GPO.

In 1963, LEO Computers Ltd was merged into English Electric Company and this led to the breaking up of the team that had inspired LEO computers. The company continued to build the LEO III, and went on to build the faster LEO 360 and even faster LEO 326 models, which had been designed by the LEO team before the takeover.

English Electric LEO Computers (EEL) (1963), then English Electric Leo Marconi (EELM) (1964), later English Electric Computers (EEC) (1967), eventually merged with International Computers and Tabulators (ICT) and others to form International Computers Limited (ICL) in 1968. In the 1980s, there were still ICL 2900 mainframes running LEO programs, using an emulator written in ICL 2960 microcode at the Dalkeith development centre.[23] At least one modern emulator has been developed which can run some original LEO III software on a modern server.[24] ICL was bought by Fujitsu in 1990.

Whether its investment in LEO actually benefited J. Lyons is unclear. Nick Pelling notes that before LEO I the company already had a proven, industry-leading system using clerks that gave it "near-real-time management information on more or less all aspects of its business", and that no jobs were lost when the system was computerized. In addition, LEO Computers lost money on many of its sales because of unrealistically low prices.[25]

In 2018, The Centre for Computing History along with LEO Computers Society were awarded funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund for their project aiming to bring together, preserve, archive and digitise a range of LEO Computers artefacts, and documents.[26] The Centre's museum gallery has an area dedicated to LEO, and as of 2021 they are also working on a LEO virtual reality project.[27][3] In November 2021, to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the first successful full program run on LEO I, the project released a film about the history of LEO, which went on to win Video of the Year in the Association of British Science Writers Awards in July 2022.[28][29]

• List of vacuum-tube computers

• Bird, P. J. (1994). LEO: The First Business Computer. Wokingham: Hasler Publishing Co. ISBN 0-9521651-0-4.
• Caminer, D. T.; Aris, J. B.; Hermon, P. M.; Land, F. F. (1998). LEO: the incredible story of the world's first business computer. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-009501-9.
• Campbell-Kelly, M., (1989). ICL: A Business and Technical History. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Caminer, D. T., Aris, J. B. B., Hermon, P. M. R., Land, F. F. (1996). User-Driven Innovation: The World’s First Business Computer. London: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-009501-9.
• Carmichael, H., editor (1996). An ICL Anthology, Chapter 6: LEO, Laidlaw Hicks, Surbiton, UK.
• Ferry, Georgina (2003), A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Tea Shops and the World's First Office Computer, London: Fourth Estate, ISBN 1-84115-185-8
• Hally, M. (2005). Electronic Brains: stories from the dawn of the computer age. Washington:Joseph Henry Press. Chapter 5: LEO the Lyons Computer. ISBN 0-309-09630-8.
• Land, F. F., (1997). LEO, the First Business Computer: A Personal Experience. In Glass, R. L., editor. In the Beginning: Recollections of Software Pioneers, pages 134–153. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA.
• PEP, (1957). Three Case Studies in Automation, PEP, London.
• Simmons, J. R. M., (1962). LEO and the Managers, MacDonald, London.
• Aris, J. B. B. (1996). "Systems Design – Then and Now". Resurrection, Summer issue 1996.
• Land, F. F. (1996). "Systems Analysis for Business Applications". Resurrection, Summer issue 1996.
• Aris, J. B. B. (2000). "Inventing Systems Engineering". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 22, No. 3, July–September, pp. 4–15
• Land, F. F. (2000). "The First Business Computer: A Case Study in User-Driven Automation". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 22, No. 3, July–September, pp. 16–26.
• Caminer, D. T. (1958), "...And How to Avoid Them". The Computer Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1.
• Caminer, D. T. (1997). "LEO and its Applications: The Beginning of Business Computing". The Computer Journal, Vol. 40, No. 10.
• Caminer, D. T. (2003). "Behind the Curtain at LEO: A Personal Reminiscence". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 25, No. 2, April–June, pp3–13.
• Hendry, J. (1988). "The Teashop Computer Manufacturer: J. Lyons". Business History, Vol. 29, No. 8, pp. 73–102.
• Land, Frank (1999). "A Historical Analysis of Implementing IS at J. Lyons." In Currie, W. G.; Galliers, R. D., editors. Rethinking Management Information Systems, pp. 310–325. Oxford University Press.
• Savard, John J. G. (2018) [2005]. "Computer Arithmetic". quadibloc. The Early Days of Hexadecimal. Archived from the original on 16 July 2018. Retrieved 16 July 2018. (Has information on the LEO III character set.)

• LEO Computers Society. Includes LEOPEDIA which is intended to be a comprehensive reference to archive, museum and media holdings and references to LEO computers, and individuals associated with them, updated periodically by Frank Land.
• LEO Magnetic Data Tape Collection at The ICL Computer Museum
• LEO Artefacts at The ICL Computer Museum
• LEO Paperwork at The ICL Computer Museum
• LEO Artefacts at the Centre for Computing History
• LEO Computers Collection, National Archive for the History of Computing, University of Manchester Library.
• How a cake company pioneered the first office computer BBC video interview with Mary Coombs, who worked on the first LEO computer and was the first woman to become a commercial computer programmer
• Oral history interview with John M. M. Pinkerton, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. Pinkerton describes his work on LEO computers. In this context he discusses the British computer firms J. Lyons and Company, English Electric, and International Computers Ltd.
• About LEO – From Business Computing: the Second 50 Years, The Guildhall conference for business leaders, London, 2001. Archived in February 2012.
• J. Lyons & Co. LEO Computers. Extract from Peter Bird's LEO – The First Business Computer (2002); at David Lawrence's Lyons website
• BBC Science: Electronic Brains BBC Radio 4 series about early computers, 2002; programme 1 is about LEO
• Hidden Histories of the Information Age BBC Radio 4 series, 2016; programme about LEO
• "Developing LEO: The world's first business computer", documents from the papers of John Simmons, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick
• Pinkerton, J. M. M. (1 January 1961). "The Evolution of Design in a series of Computers, LEO I-III". The Computer Journal. 4 (1): 42–46. doi:10.1093/comjnl/4.1.42. ISSN 0010-4620.
• "David Caminer obituary". Daily Telegraph. 24 June 2008.
• "LEO: the story of the world's first business computer". YouTube. The Centre for Computing History. 30 November 2021.