For John Simmons, comptroller of what was once Britain's
largest catering company,J
Lyons & Co, there was only one option
available to take advantage of the huge benefits offered by
electronic calculating machines: Lyons must build its own. It was
1947. No such machine was commercially available in the UK, and the
costs of buying an American machine would be
prohibitive.
On 20 October that year, Simmons presented a proposal prepared
by two of his lieutenants, Raymond Thompson and Oliver
Standingford, to the Lyons board. In his introduction, Simmons
wrote, "Here, for the first time, there is a possibility of a
machine that will be able to cope, at almost incredible speed, with
any variation in clerical procedure.
"What effect such a machine could have on the semi-repetitive
work of the office needs only the slightest effort of imagination."
A little more than four years later, Leo (Lyons Electronic Office)
took over a weekly task called bakery valuations from human clerks,
and so became the first computer in the world to run a routine
office job.
In later years, as
Leo Computers went
into business as a computer supplier, competitors had fun with the
notion that a purveyor of tea and cakes might claim a place at the
cutting edge of office technology.
A history of innovation
But to anyone who knew how Lyons worked, it should not have come
as a surprise. With a chain of teashops that had grown to 250 by
the 1930s and several restaurants and hotels, Lyons had always been
ahead of the game in factory automation and time-and-motion-based
"scientific management".
In 1923, it hired Simmons, a top Cambridge mathematics graduate,
to apply the same rigour to its back-office operations.
Closely following the victory celebrations after the Second
World War came news that American scientists had built an
"electronic brain" -
Eniac
- to carry out ballistics calculations. When Simmons sent Thompson
and Standingford on a fact-finding tour of the US in 1947, they
talked to the elite group of engineers and mathematicians who were
taking the next steps in electronic calculation.
On the voyage home, the two men drafted their report to the
board, showing how a machine designed to do mathematics could also
write form letters, issue invoices and produce payslips.
Their most important discovery was that Cambridge University was
building its own machine, the 3,000-valve
Electronic Delay
Storage Automatic Calculator (Edsac). Impressed by its
designer, Maurice Wilkes, Lyons decided to fund Edsac's
development.
The 1947 agreement, sealed with a handshake, gave Cambridge
£3,000 in return for permission for Lyons to build its own copy of
the machine if it worked.
In 1949, Edsac ran its first program, and Lyons began to build
Leo, its engineers inventing as they went along the much more
demanding input and output devices it would need for commercial
operations.
Leo was soon in demand as a bureau service for other clients:
payroll for Ford, classified work for the Ministry of Defence, tax
tables for the Inland Revenue. Lyons needed a second machine for
its own use.
The higher management at Lyons asked the obvious question: why
not make more machines for sale, specialising in office
applications? The company founded Leo Computers in 1954. At the
time, there was little competition in the UK market, with Ferranti
the closest competitor, but mainly supplying scientific users.
Still valve-based, Leo II was not much of an advance on Leo I
and only nine were sold. In 1962 Leo III, a transistor-based
machine with some truly innovative features, came into operation.
Eventually, there were about 60 Leo III installations worldwide,
and the last did not come out of service until 1981.
But even as it realised the full glory of its technological
achievement, Leo Computers faced commercial eclipse. Always a
source of financial anxiety to the Lyons board, it was sold to
English Electric in 1964. By 1968, with IBM now spending more on
research and development alone than the combined turnover of the
half-dozen or so British computer manufacturers, they merged -
under pressure from the Ministry of Technology - to form a single
company, ICL.
Leo's early success owed less to its hardware than to its highly
innovative systems-oriented approach to programming, devised and
led by David Caminer. The Leo consultants who sold the machines
designed bespoke systems for their clients, beginning with a
detailed analysis of the task at hand.
Management failures
Although this led to excellent customer satisfaction, it was a
poor business model, as the services of consultants were never
costed. Higher sales might have brought in more resources, but Leo
had to fight a management culture whose response to new technology
ranged from suspicious to indifferent.
Speaking in 1958, Lord Halsbury, director of the National
Research Development Corporation, said, "The American user has
supported the American computer manufacturer consistently and
enthusiastically
In Britain, he has hung back, waiting to see a new idea tried
out."
The application of computing at Lyons in the early 1950s was the
most advanced of its kind in the world, but ultimately Leo could
not hold its position in the face of greater commercial and
government investment in the US firms that caught up all too
soon.
More research and development, more technologically literate
boardrooms, more government horizon-scanning: these are just some
of the fixes that might help Britain avoid a similar abdication of
technological advantage in future.
The greatest tragedy in Leo's loss was the extinction of a sales
philosophy based on the needs of each user. Expensive it may have
been, but not half as expensive as the catastrophic failures that
have too often resulted from a one-size-fits-all approach.
● Georgina Ferry is the author of
A Computer Called Leo: Lyons Teashops and the World's First Office
Computer, published by Harper Perennial