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Wikipedia, The Times, the Guardian, The Annals of IT, the Cambridge Centre for Computing History, TNMoC , the LSE and the Computer History Museum of Mountain View California have all published Obituaries. Also BBC Radio 4 transmitted a “Last Word” Interview.

The Times published an Obituary on 18th June 2026 which you can read Here

The Guardian Newspaper Published an Obituary written by Georgina Ferry Here

Wikipedia has an Obituary Here

There is comment on Social Media already and an Obituary on Annals of IT, Here

The Centre for Computer History (CCH) have posted on their website Here and on Facebook

And a Facebook post from TNMoC Here

London School of Economics have posted on their LinkedIn Here

Dag Spicer of the Computer History museum , Mountain View, California, posted on LinkedIn Here

The, as yet unfinished, but already substantial LEO Archive at the Centre for Computer History in Cambridge can be accessed directly from the LEO Heritage menu on this Website. Or access it from Here

LEO was developed from the Cambridge EDSAC between 1949 and 1951 and ran the first commercial data processing job in the world, the bakery valuation in November 1951. The LEO was developed by John Pinkerton and his team at Cadby Hall, Hammersmith, London which was Joseph Lyons and Company’s main offices and manufacturing facilities. Pinkerton didn’t just copy EDSAC but he re-engineered it substantially to improve reliability and maintainability, vital for commercial computing, and to provide buffers on slow peripherals like paper tape, card readers and printers so that the peripherals could be run at full speed and be overlapped with processing.

The LEO Computer Society will be creating a series of events during 2026 to celebrate the event and to inform the public of the remarkable British Innovations during the 1950s which will be announced here, on Social media and in in the Press

Another innovation in 1950 was the introduction of the Ferranti Mark 1 computer, the first computer available commercially developed by the Manchester electrical engineering company Ferranti in conjunction with Manchester University. This computer addressed requirements in the technical and science field and, although it was not known at the time because of secrecy it was a direct result of work done at Bletchley Park and the development of the Colossus in WW II. The team at Manchester included Max Newman and Alan Turing, ex Bletchley Park and Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn, from the University who developed the Williams tube an early form of Computer Memory.

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