LEO editor

I. A. Lovelock in Management Accounting.

“This book is a first-hand account of how this astounding innovation came about. It is a flesh and blood, warts and all story related by the participants, brimming over with the same enthusiasm that enabled the unlikeliest of organisations to lead the way into the future that we are all familiar with today.

It concludes with different strands coming together to provide the essence of the LEO credo of comprehensive, integrated, secure, action stimulated implementations.”

I. A. Lovelock: Read More »

Professor T. Brady, Brighton University

        “As well as being a fascinating piece of historical writing the book provides food for thought in the supposedly computer literate world of the 21st Century. Spectacular computer disasters such as the London Stock Exchange’s Taurus system have left us with rather jaundiced perceptions about computer projects. Why were Lyons better at implementing computer systems?

One major factor was that before automating business processes the Lyons team ensured that they were well understood and ready for computerisation. Long before the prospect of computers came along, Lyons had established a systems research office with the brief to constantly search out how improvements might be made to the business by changing processes.”

Professor T. Brady: Read More »

Professor Paul Ceruzzi, Smithsonian Institute Washington

“Most surveys of the history of computing mark the beginning of the commercial computer age with the delivery of the first UNIVAC in 1951.  The better ones note the first delivery of a UNIVAC to a commercial, not government, customer (General Electric) in 1954.  Only the best histories mention LEO, a computer  built by the British catering company J. Lyons & Co. and first operational in September 1951, as the real beginning of commercial application of the stored-program computer.”

Professor Paul Ceruzzi: Read More »

Ferry, Georgina (2003) ‘A Computer Called LEO’, Fourth Estate, London.
‘LEO and its creators deserve their place in history not because of what it was, but because of what it did. For LEO was the first computer in the world to be harnessed to the task of running a business.

                              A paperback edition was published in 2005, by Harper Perennial

Ferry, Georgina (2003) ‘A Computer Called LEO’: Read More »

Caminer H., editor (2016) ‘LEO remembered: by the people who worked on the world’s first business computers’, LEO Computers Society. Collection of reminiscences, testifying to a sense of collective endeavour among the LEO community.

Caminer H., editor (2016): Read More »

Lenaerts, E. (1948) ‘Development of the LEO Computer: Brief Description of EDSAC’.
Peter Bird collected and had bound (September 1992) the photocopies of the handwritten description of EDSAC compiled by Ernest Lenaerts in October 1948, with contributions from David Caminer, Derek Hemy, Thomas Thompson and others.  It formed the basis of a larger publication titled The Layman’s Guide to LEO – see below.  The volume was donated to the LEO Computers Society by Philip Bird, November 2017.

Lenaerts, E. (1948) ‘Development of the LEO Computer: Read More »