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 postwar British computer business. Why did it lose the initiative? Why did the US succeed while British design was often superior?
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
'A COMPUTER CALLED LEO is as captivating a book as you could hope for, whether it's industrial history you're after, or a commentary on the development of computing, or social documentary, or an elegant tragedy. One reads it with a growing sense of gloomy fatalism and even gloomier recognition. But one also reads it with admiration and fascination, not just for Georgina Ferry's poised, cool and elegant storytelling but for the people involved in the making of LEO, who, before they were let down by the suits, did something extraordinary because nobody had told them it couldn't be done.' Michael Bywater, Daily Telegraph 'Meticulously researched and cogently written, it sets the story in the wider context of early computer development both in America and the UK.' Fanny Blake, The Times 'This is not a book for computer nerds, but one for anyone curious about mid-20th-century Britain's unique combination of engineering genius and economic frailty.' Sunday Telegraph
About the Author
Georgina is the author of Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life, a biography of the only British woman scientist to win a Nobel Prize and THE COMMON THREAD (with John Sulston) which is short listed for the 2002 Samuel Johnson Prize. Born in Hong Kong, Georgina has lived in Oxford for the past 19 years. She has worked as a science writer and broadcaster.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tea, Cakes, and the First Business Computer,
By R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER) (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: A Computer Called Leo (P.S.) (Paperback)
I was in a gift stop a couple of weeks ago, and made a purchase, for which the clerk took a form book, wrote down what I was buying and the price (she added tax mentally and did not need a calculator), and having finished, she gave me a carbon copy and I was on my way. It has been years since I had such a pen and paper transaction. There is almost always an electronic cash register now, and it is usually hooked up to the big store computer, which also does the inventory, pay slips, and many other accounting and management functions. There was a time when computers were not a part of businesses, and now there is a time that they are almost universal. What was the first business computer, and what company put it to work? The surprising answer is in _A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Teashops and the World's First Office Computer_ (Harper Perennial) by Georgina Ferry. It is an enchanting book about times long ago, even if it is about industrial history and computer development. The boffins who made and used their hand-built computer were well ahead of their times, and at least partially because of that, we know IBM and we don't know LEO, but LEO is worth knowing about.
Lyons was a firm one would not have predicted to be in the vanguard of business technology. Its famous stores throughout Britain served tea and cakes. As Ferry says, "A background in catering is not normally seen as an obvious qualification for hi-tech startup companies." But the Lyons shops had a progressive management, interested in contemporary scientific management principles, and took on a Cambridge graduate in mathematics, who realized that the primitive computers being developed in the US could be used for business. Much of the book involves the details of building the computer when computers consisted of a room full of electronic tubes (anachronistically termed "valves" because of the way they could turn off and on a stream of current). There were over 3,000 such valves, and cables all over the room to connect them, and of course, the resultant machine had far less computing power than the chip inside Tickle-Me-Elmo. Eventually, it worked. In 1951, LEO (for Lyons Electronic Office) took responsibility for bakery operations, and eventually took over such jobs as managing the payroll. At the time, there was no comparable machine anywhere in the world, and no commercial market for them. So in 1954, Lyons the teashops created Leo Computers Ltd. After that, LEO's story becomes a sad one. They did produce machines, and the machines worked. The initial LEO computer did its jobs for fourteen years, before finally being turned off in a little ceremony in 1965. Another installed in 1958 at a steelworks was in continuous use until it was retired in 1971. "I don't suppose we shall ever again keep a computer in service as long as this one," said one manager. Some LEOs worked for the post office, coming out of service only in 1981. The man in charge of them said, "We were very fond of LEOs. They just worked. There was no reason to change them." The post office at one point actually wanted to buy more of them, but Leo Computers could not generate needed capital and had had to merge with other firms. Eventually LEO could not compete with the billions invested by firms like IBM. The American government, too, had backed American computers, while no comparable support came from the British government. Thus LEO is a footnote, not an ancestor, to current business computing, but the men who built it succeeded in a momentous and prescient project. Along the way, Ferry's wonderfully researched and entertaining book is able to summarize a lot of computing history, taking in such subjects as Alan Turing's work at Bletchley Park and John von Neumann's prophetic design of computer architecture. She also tells of the mechanical computers designed by the Victorian visionary Charles Babbage, who felt his inventions were slighted by his own government and admired by the Americans. It was a lesson that had not been learned a century later.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The world's first business computer,
By
This review is from: A Computer Called Leo (P.S.) (Paperback)
The world's first business computer was developed by Lyons, a British tea and catering company. It was the Lyons Electronic Office, or LEO, and it ran its first task, the bakery division's payroll, on 12 February 1954.
Lyons was a family business founded late in the 19th century. It ran one of the first franchise fast food chains, offering set tea meals served at the customer's table by prim waitresses. Much like McDonald's today, the firm understood that each transaction between Lyons and its customers brought only a few pennies into the family coffers, therefore viability and commercial success depended on efficient operational and clerical administration, particularly for controlling inventory and registering transactions. In 1923 Lyons hired John Simmons, a Cambridge honours mathematics graduate, as a management trainee. Simmons turned out to be a brilliant manager and sought out every opportunity to rationalize and simplify clerical operations. When computers appeared in the late 1940s and two junior staff proposed using them at Lyons, Simmons enthusiastically agreed they should explore the idea further. Lyons soon realized that the nature of business differed from that of science. Instead of resolving a few complex problems, business required speedy processing of many simple problems. Available scientific computers weren't adequate, and besides they were expensive and had to be imported form America. Lyons decided to build its own, and LEO was born. Because it was designed specifically to meet business needs and because the project was led by Lyons's avant-garde Systems division, LEO proved a greater success than anyone had dared hope and the division was spun off as a separate company. Sadly the venture never took off. Building a LEO was a huge project. They were built to order, took years to deliver, and needed Lyons's own specialists to program and maintain them. When LEO sold a machine, it would lose one of its best people to the customer. The Lyons board had enthusiastically supported developing LEO as an internal project but they lacked the vision to pursue the burgeoning business computing market. In the end, the market was taken over by competitors though not before Lyons got the British Post Office to sign what was then one of the largest contracts in computing. Vincent Poirier, Tokyo
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