stoppress

We are delighted to be able to announce that we have appointed Kate Stockwell to this new position. Kate impressed the selection panel of Lisa McGerty, Peter Byford and Hilary Caminer and is scheduled to take up her post on Wednesday, 12th March.

Kate will be working on the LEO archive at CCH – following on the excellent work carried out as part of the NLHF project by Jude Brimmer and Luke Thorne. This new post has been generously funded by the AIT Trust and is named in honour of Frank and Ralph Land, key figures in the development and marketing of LEO from its earliest days. Kate will be working three days a week, Wednesday to Friday for two years. 

Kate shows enormous enthusiasm for archiving work, and has recent highly-praised experience in projects at several Cambridge colleges on a variety of themes. We will ask her to introduce herself to you all in the near future.

In the meantime, we feel it is great news that work on the LEO archive can now resume.

Andrew Herbert, is a distinguished Computer Science practitioner who hails from the Cambridge Tradition. Having held a very senior position in Microsoft Research, in retirement he is the leader of the project on display at TNMoC to construct a replica of the pioneering EDSAC I computer at the University of Cambridge which first went into service in 1949.

On 26 April 2024 Andre spoke to the LEO Computer Society on Zoom  about the reconstruction project , now close to completion.  He spoke of the challenges of reconstructing a machine for which there were very few surviving circuit diagrams – the EDSAC reconstruction team worked mostly from contemporary photographs and secondary sources and research into established circuits for “computing with waveforms” known to 1940s electronics engineers.

A recording is available here Zoom Recording

Copy of the slides used can be found here Slides

Over time there have been a number of programmes on the BBC Radio which have talked about LEO. Neville Lyons put together material extracted from the BBC programmes together with relevant Slides to provide visual content and this was presented on 12 December 2023. A recording is available here Zoom Recording

To listen to the original BBC material without the slides you can follow the links below.

LEO the Electronic Office from BBC Radio 4 Computing Britain

LEO BBC Radio 4 Extra

LEO Making History BBC Radio 5 Live Outriders