David Holdsworth – I went to state schools in the then West Riding of Yorkshire, where the Director of Education was Alec Clegg, well-known for his left-wing views. As a result, I left a co-ed comprehensive school in 1961 and went on to read Physics at Oxford University following a few months working in the works laboratory of English Electric. I began my computing career as a physics research student writing Algol60 programs modelling quarks on a KDF9. After discovering that I might be better at computing than physics, I got a job at Leeds University in 1967 where we implemented the Eldon2 multi-access operating system on KDF9, which was still running at NPL in 1980. Leeds University’s KDF9 was succeeded by an ICL 1906A where I was involved with George3 and George4. At Leeds I was an early champion of Amdahl and of UNIX.
I was often helping others with their computing issues. After completing the doctorate, I went to a job in the Electronic Computing Laboratory at Leeds University, where I worked in a variety of roles until 2004. Actually the thesis was written up while at Leeds. My developments on their KDF9 are documented in Resurrection, the journal of the Computer Conservation Society. Suffice to say that I was a key figure in implementing the Eldon2 multi-access system, which enabled us to offer interactive computing from March 1968, with 32 tele-types connected via a PDP-8.
I started resurrecting/preserving software in the late 1990s. By resurrecting/preserving I mean getting the software into a modern digital state and providing the ability to execute it. George3 was the first such rebirth, using the official George3 issue magnetic tapes, followed by the BBC micro’s Domesday Project. The first software rescued from printer listings was KDF9’s Whetstone Algol. I was also involved in the preservation of digital material that is not computer software. An important principle of my work has been that emulation should work on a wide range of current hardware, with a view to working on future systems. Sometime around new year 2013, John Daines asked if I could use my skills in software resurrection on the pile of listings of Leo III Intercode that had been collected by Colin Tully. After resurrecting software for 1900, BBC micro and KDF9, I was keen to try rescuing software from a machine of which I had no prior knowledge, so as better to appreciate what we need to preserve if future generations can comprehend early machines. I was delighted when John Daines asked me if I could resurrect the Intercode system that he had obtained from Colin Tully’s widow. I immediately put my work on the Edinburgh IMP system on the back burner, where it resides to this day.
I came to Leo III expecting to find an assembly language and set about implementing Intercode treating the printout as the source text of an assembly language. It soon dawned on me that there were no labels, and that really I was dealing with a machine code for a fictitious machine, a sort of Leo IV.
The raw machine code also came as something of a surprise, devoting all sorts of complexities to computing with a variable radix, and using sign-and-modulus for information in the store but converting to 2’s complement in the A register (but not the B register). A step-by-step account of my voyage of discovery which led to a working Leo III emulation is here.
I am fascinated by Intercode, as I think it may offer a window onto the time when assembly languages were emerging, a time before my own entry into computing, perhaps via a privileged side entrance. Seehttps://www.dropbox.com/s/g2ullpu7ooxwvya/David%20Holdsworth%20Memoir.docx?dl=0
Stan Holwill: My LEO Involvement & Memories January 2018 Date of birth 1932.
Abstract: Stan started his working life in 1947, with an interest in engineering, at an
electrical engineerg firm Clifford & Snell in Sutton Surrey.
I served a five years engineering apprenticeship. During this time I spent one day a week
at Wimbledon Technical College studying for ONC & HNC, followed by National
Service in the Royal Corp of Signals working as a radio mechanic. On return to civilian
life spotted an advertisement in Wireless World from J. Lyons for an engineer to work on
digital computers. Applied, interviewed by Ernest Lenaerts and Peter Mann, accepted
and joined LEO as junior computer engineer in January 1956, working at Cadby Hall on
LEO I. Rapidly promoted to prototype commissioning engineer on LEO II/I and then
chief maintenance engineer for the Elms House LEO II. From November 1956 acted as
managing commissioning engineer for LEO IIs until 1961 responsible for a series of
LEO II customers starting with Stewarts and Lloyds (LEO II/3) and going on to LEO
II/11. In 1963 appointed Manager of the Maintenance Development Department
(London). Remained in post until end 1970 when Minerva Road was
closed. Subsequently worked with other ICL machines until retirement in 1991
Enjoyed his 15 year career with LEO, with working with LEO II the highlight.
Text: https://www.dropbox.com/h
Alan Hooker memoir.
Alan Hooker’s reminiscences: here is what I remember of my time at LEO. Some of the dates
area bit vague and might be suspect but then that describes me now!
I’ve also included notes on my visit to New Zealand which you might find interesting. In 1963 it
was like pre-war Britain and that scenario has gone forever now.
I joined LEO in June 1958 at Elms House from the BBC and went through a six week LEO II
training course, at the end of which I was thoroughly confused and questioning whether I had
made another bad career choice. I was given a number of small maintenance jobs and utilities
to work on then assigned to some major changes to LEO I programs. As I remember they were
full of formed orders (Editor: orders created by the programmer by treating an instruction as if
it was data held in store) as there was no B-line modification and my program errors frequently
caused me to try to obey data. It was here that the penny dropped–the computer can try to
obey data or do arithmetic on instructions, in memory they are both the same. Even so the
Lyons bakeries were not brought a grinding halt and I emerged with the beginnings of
programming ability.I returned to LEO II work under Betty Cooper (Newman) to write the Lyons
Ice Cream suite. For Betty I had to code in ink and she checked of code. Any sheet of code she
disapproved of was returned to me for rewriting (in ink). By the time the code got to Data Prep
it was fit for testing. Another thing I remember about this suite was the correction to sales
commission due to fluctuations in ambient temperature between this year and the
corresponding temperature last year. I therefore was required to code a routine which, inter
alia calculated corrected sales as actual sales times a constant raised to the none integral power
of the difference between the temperatures calculated to one position of decimals. This could
be positive or negative. Whilst I was sitting there with furrowed brow John Lewis helpfully told
me to increase the temperatures by ten and divide the answer by 100. And so the calculations
were done and so the commission was calculated and the salesmen found it incomprehensible!
About this time Lector was introduced and the Xeronic printer installed in Elms House, so I
worked on modifying the Teashops system to accommodate them, In 1960 I was assigned to
help The Standard Triumph Motor Company (LE$O II/8) in Coventry develop their stock control
system under the management of Arthur Payman. Arthur had a Messerschmitt two seat/three
wheeled bubble car in which we trundled up the M1 every Monday morning, and I returned by
train at the end of the week. I think I worked on this project for about a year.
I then moved to Hartree House to work for Doug Comish on the Persian Lamb Sales System for
the Hudson’s Bay Company (Editor: a LEO II bureau job). This was the first time that I had acted
as the front man doing requirements, design, coding, testing and delivery. Added to that the
Powers Samas Samastronic printer was LEO’s first Alpha numeric printer and was a bit
whimsical in behaviour. It struck me as a bit odd that Persian Lambskins grown in South West
Africa should be auctioned in London by a company with a Canadian name. Very little went
according to plan. The sale was originally going to be small with plenty of time between receipt
of skins and the auction to sort out problems, and the manual system would be the backup. In
the event, because of the African weather, lambing was late, the closing date for the sale was
late and a quarter of a million skins had to be and processed. On the day of the sale, David
Caminer, and the engineer (who brought his French Horn and played Till Eulenspiegel for us)
and sundry volunteers worked through the night, sometimes with fingers in the dyke, and
delivered the results in the morning. What is more, despite the complexities of the accounting,
we balanced to the penny!
Shortly after this we did stock control and sales forecasting for Lightning Fasteners, a subsidiary
of ICI and the major source of zip fasteners in the UK. This was interesting because it was an
early commercial use of exponential smoothing of averages. Another stock control system we
did was for the H.J. Heinz company, a just-in-time raw commodity scheduling system for their
factory in Hayes. I don’t remember when LEO 3/1 was installed at Hartree House (Editor: 1967)
but I was then put in charge of a number of programmers working in Intercode and I also
lectured on the LEO 3 Programming Course .My manager was Helen Jackson (Clark). People in
the room I remember were Alan G Hooker, Jim Feeny, Tomas Maria Leonard Wizniewski,
Rosemary Oakeshott, Diana Myra Loy Cooper (Didy); others whose names I don’t today recall
but will probably remember tomorrow whilst forgetting these. I was then tasked with setting up
a unit to write standard commercial programs. We managed to design a flow chart for updating
serial files and a prototype data vet program, but the availability of random access discs and
IBM’s initiative with CICS took the wind out of those sails and efforts were diverted to standard
commercial routines.
I moved on to work for Ralph Land as a consultant, basically a Sales Support analyst. One
Monday he said to me “How would you like to do a project in New Zealand for a couple of
months?”. “When?” I asked.” “Next Friday” replied Ralph. So four days later with a suitcase,
passport and a round the world ticket I set off for Wellington, via Hong Kong and Sydney. I
arrived in Wellington late Monday afternoon, was met by David Howard, the local General
Manager and was driven straight to the office of English Electric Leo Computers to start work! A
good job I had broken the journey in Sydney. The computer bureau was based on an EE KDF6,
and offices were housed in a small square perhaps about half a mile from the harbour. I had
been booked into a small hotel a few minutes’ walk from the offices, on the face of it very
convenient, but in the event it turned out to be little different from a dingy boarding house with
nowhere to work in the evening. When I complained about this the next day, the excuse was
that there was large business convention in town and nothing better was available. I therefore
went to the best hotel in town, the Grand, and booked a room for a month. After that I
returned to the office to start preparing my Tender. The Company was hopelessly under
resourced to bid for a distributed banking system, or to support such a system if the bid was
successful, but I was there to have a go. At the end of a week I had overwhelmed the typing
resources (no word processors in those days). Then there was a break of a week while the
commercial and other local aspects of the proposal were prepared, during which I was sent
down to Christchurch in South Island to investigate the potential market for computer bureau
business. I made a few appointments, but I felt the time was not ripe for a start-up bureau
centre.
Returning to Wellington to submit the proposal to the Bank of New Zealand, I was offered the
post of General Manager of South Island with a view to taking over from David Howard as
Country Manager when his contract expired in a year’s time. Although tempted, I asked to
consider my answer after returning to the UK and assessing the future there. I also took the
opportunity to call in at the local office of Atlantic and Pacific Travel whose Managing Director
was the brother of Ian Crawford, a LEO consultant and one of my Kingston flatmates. They
kindly rerouted my return trip via Fiji, Tahiti, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York,
returning to Wellington.
From Wellington I flew to Auckland to touch base with the local office of English Electric. I had
a great time in New Zealand but it was a technological backwater; looking back, I probably
made the right decision from a career point of view. Once back in the UK I found it difficult to
find a career niche so I left EELM to become the General Manager of Tyndall computers in
Bristol in (I think) April 1965. Apart from acting as Director of the ICL Computer Users
Conference, I had very little contact with ICL for the next few years. I joined Dataskil in 1979 as a
Project Manager in PMS Reading under Ollie Smith and John Benbo, largely in a support role for
other Project Managers and doing project Audits. One project I managed was to act as the
General Sales Manager for Dataskil under George McLeman. Acting as line management of
wheeler dealer salesmen and their was beyond my experience, and I was regarded with
suspicion by the unit. However with a £30 million sales target and a year to achieve it we had to
get on with it and we made the numbers. I Then returned to PMS. Several company
reorganisations later I was the manager of the unit but the culture had changed and I resigned
from the unit to manage the transition of the BAA data processing systems from Honeywell to
ICL computers. It was a five year project, the largest project I had managed and when I took it
over it was exactly two years behind schedule. Three years later we finished it on time and
budget! I then took early retirement.
A fuller account including recollections of travelling and holidays is included in:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/qjywskwpwzrnyn1t0lb2n/Alan-Hooker-memoir.doc?dl=0&rlkey=eecbdm3e0e5zydk5k4gkoyf29
Barry Hooper, Programmer Shell Australia
I remember my LEO programming days. Such fun and so stimulating to see what you
have programmed do its job. That LEO was remarkable and its origins amazing. I was so
sorry at Shell to see the LEO go and an inferior computer put in I its place. Its only asset
was direct access to disks all else was quite lousy and so hard to work. Fancy needing
System Programmers just to keep it workable!
Follow up
Thanks for your information and particularly the “LEO Matters” documentation. Brings
back interesting memories. What a great computer LEO was. That Master Routine was
brilliant. And printing in the background too, IBM could not do that! Actually I always
felt we went backwards when Shell moved to IBM. But then it did have direct access with
its disks. The Operating System and file management facilities were unnecessarily
complicated and left a lot to be desired.
There were so many facilities in PL/1 that programmers were essentially each writing in
different languages. Bye Bye to decent maintenance and flexibility.
- Carole Hynam: Working for Wills as a 15 year old in the late 1950s
I came to be working for W.D. and H. O. Wills in Bristol because although I had always wanted to go to Art School, I came from a family that had never gone into further education (because in our section of society you had to be very well off or gain a scholarship.) Even though I was always in the top three in an A stream, as it was called, my careers officer told me there was no chance I would pass the entrance exam for WD and HO and would probably get a job in a factory or a shop. Luckily I had already taken the exam otherwise I may have pulled out at that point. Things were pretty grim in 1957 as it was only 12 years after the war had ended and money was very thin on the ground and so instead of taking the job offered to me in an advertising workshop sending me to art school one day a week I took the position offered by WD and HO because it was offering £3 per week. I had heard my parents struggling with money and felt it would help them too.
I was chosen to work on ‘Leo’ as I had scored well in Maths in my Wills entrance exam. I really didn’t appreciate at the time how honoured I was to be selected to work on Leo as WD and HO had a huge number of employees and I had come from an ordinary Secondary Modern school to work alongside of grammar school girls and public school boys. There were four of us chosen to work – two of us 15 year olds putting in data and two 16 year olds who were scrutinisers to check our work with a manager in charge of us called Irene. She seemed very old to us 15 year olds but was probably in her forties.
The year was 1957/8 and the computer took up half of the general office. There was a great deal of suspicion from the other workers in the offices as I think they thought they may lose their jobs. We had an engineer called Reg who used to start the computer each morning and one programmer. As time went by more programmers were employed. The work was very spasmodic and we spent many hours just sitting waiting for our work to come in. The computer was very sensitive to damp conditions and if it rained it didn’t work at all well. I remember Reg telling us it had the same valves as an electronic organ and that’s why it seemed to play a tune on being started up. When fully trained our agility was important as we had to work at great speeds.
I stayed with WD and HO for just two years and then moved on to work for the NHS as a records officer. In hindsight I was probably silly to leave but at 16 I didn’t find the work satisfying enough. After a long and varied career, I started painting again and luckily for me it took off. I still paint and do the odd commission and have sold over two hundred paintings during my life.
I feel very honoured to have been part of the story of this wonderful invention, Leo. I regard it as a very important part of my working life and at 77 years of age am able to relate this fascinating experience to some of my son’s friends who are in the IT industry. How things have moved on.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/axbsdfv68jf0q53/Carole%20Hynam%20reminiscences%202.docx?dl=0
Roy Irons, one of Ilford Ltd LEO 2/9 computer operator:
The British Oxygen LEO 2/8 was in Edmonton, North London where they had a factory,
distribution and offices. There was also a LEO 2 in the Slough area, I remember going over
there once, at night!
Another thought occurred to me, modern day ‘computer experts’ would not realise that
in the ‘old days’ the programmes were kept on punched cards, not preloaded as now.
Each time you ran a programme you fed the programme in front of the data. As the
programmes were regularly updated, sometimes daily for new programmes, it was the
operator’s worst fear that a card jam would happen while feeding the programme in.
You always hoped that the programmer had updated the spare programme pack! I and
my shift colleague spent many a time reconstituting ripped punch cards after piecing
the bits of the jigsaw together. Problems always occurred at night, rarely when the
programmer was about with his or her notes! Computer operators had to know how to
take the various bits of equipment apart to retrieve ripped cards, etc. The knowledge of
card readers, punches and sorters became a vital part of our job. We also had to help
the engineers locate faults on the main frame. It was a tough life, it was another world!
See http://www.glias.org.uk/news/256news.html
Bill Jack
Bill Jack, English Electric Engineer (team leader) Ravenscraig LEO III, recollection.
The Leo III was acquired by the Colvilles Group Engineering Department on behalf of the
Ravenscraig Works. They had already installed the KDN2 on the Slab Mill. I was a young
engineer in the department and was sent to Kidsgrove to learn about the KDN2. When the
Leo III arrived I was put in charge of the implementation team because I knew about
computers! The LEO III was applied to production control/tracking throughout the
steelworks complex and also to the production of the weekly payroll for 4,000 employees.
The LEO III continued in both roles from 1965 till around 1972 when it was replaced by an
IBM 360.
The most interesting feature of the installation was the extensive use made of Lector
documents to record information directly from the operatives at the various processing points
throughout the plant. These documents were collected at the end of each shift and processed
in time for the production meetings at 9.00am the following morning.
You do correctly identify the tussle between the Finance and Engineering Directorates but
this was resolved by the Finance Director purchasing an ICL 1900, installing it in another of
Colvilles steelworks at Clydebridge and proceeding independently. This did not impinge
upon the installation at Ravenscraig.
As a result of our conversations I have been in contact with members of the original LEO III
32 team and will put together a short record of the installation and the applications. This I
can forward to you if of interest.
Bill Jack
Helen Jackson (nee Clark)
Born June 1936 in Wigan, I was the youngest of 3 daughters to a manager at the local coal
mine.
At the age of five I was sent to a private preparatory school, to which even at that age I went
by myself on two buses each way. From this school I passed the 11 plus and went to Wigan
High School for Girls.
That same year my father died from heart attack; my mother never re-married.
In my penultimate school year, on a school trip to France I had to make a speech in French to
the Mayor of Paris, thanking them for their hospitality, which I can recite to this day. In my
final year I was appointed Head Girl
After my A levels in 1954, I went to Manchester University, and graduated in Maths in 1957.
I went for job interviews to English Electric, Vickers Aircraft and LEO. I liked LEO best,
particularly the job Appreciation Course, which in those days was a one day elementary
programming course and tests on it, with the interview coming after the test results were
known. I thought ‘I can do this’, and joined Leo in September 1957.
My sisters were by then living near London, and my mother had decided to move South
anyway, and did this soon after I joined LEO.
After my programming course I was put into the programming section managed by Jim
Smith, which had about 15 programmers working mainly in technical and insurance
applications. I worked on several of these, on both LEO I and LEO II, and was rapidly
promoted to be a Senior Programmer.
In 1959 LEO moved from Elms House, adjacent to Lyons head office at Cadby Hall, to
Hartree House in Bayswater. LEO needed much more space for growth, for both
programming work and computer operations for service bureau and computer customers.
In 1961 I was given responsibility for all service bureau application programming, and raised
to management level. At 24, I was told that I was both the youngest person and the first
woman ever to achieve this in the whole Lyons organisation.
Also in 1961 I married Mike Jackson. We had first met when Mike, also one of Jim
Smith’s programmers, was giving some of the lectures on my initial programming course on
joining LEO. After that, we had had very little contact until the autumn of 1958 when all
London Transport bus drivers went on strike, which lasted a few weeks. One lunch time a
group of us were chatting about the effects of this on them, and I told them that I had to walk
over 3 miles each way to and from the station to get to work, unless I could thumb a lift from
a passing motorist. Mike offered to take me home that day on his motorbike, and this led to
him taking me regularly to and from work for the duration of the strike. A strong
relationship soon formed, which has lasted ever since. We will be celebrating our Diamond
Wedding this year.
Mike was a keen racing dinghy sailor, and from early 1959 I crewed him regularly, in boats
he had designed and built himself. We won many races, including regatta trophies, and
were 3 times National Champions in the Class.
Following my promotion in 1961, the work for service bureau programming steadily
increased. Initially, Hartree House had LEO II/5, with a drum, magnetic tape, and very fast
printers. These latter items made it much more capable than LEO II/1 at Elms House, and
much more service bureau work could be taken on. Later, LEO III/1 was installed there,
many times more powerful than the LEO II, and my department was steadily expanded to
meet the customer workload that the greatly extra computing power enabled. Eventually I
had 53 programmers working for me.
Service bureau programming was where most new trainee programmers were placed, some
proving to be of high calibre, and I was delighted that they came through my department on
their way to better things. Noteworthy were Mike Daniels, Jim Feeney, Dick Peters.
However, all good things come to an end. I this case, it was with the arrival of our first
child in 1965, after over 4 years as Service Bureau Programming Manager. I did not return
to LEO, although after the birth, Mike asked me to write the programme for the largest and
most complex job he was planning for the LEO 326 installation he was managing. This was
written in CLEO for the handling of the accounts for a very large mail order company, which
came to be handling over 300,00 agents and individual accounts of over a million credit
customers. (Editor: that was the London Mail Order Company which Mike later joined. See
Mike Jackson’s own oral history). It was very successful. We had two more children, in
1967 and 1969.
By 1978, I decided that I would like a part time job, and started as bookkeeper for a small
nearby firm in the building industry. When there, having told the boss about my time at
LEO, he got me to use Atkins Computing, a service bureau in Epsom, to do structural
calculations for some design work. This was followed with his purchase of an Apple II in
1980, my first introduction to personal computers. I was pleasantly surprised at how
powerful it was, and after machine code on LEO II, what a flexible language Basic is. I
stopped working for him in 1981, when I started teaching.
We had sent our daughters to an independent grammar school. At a parents evening, in a
chat with the headmistress I told her of my time at LEO. This resulted in being asked to
introduce computer studies into the curriculum, and I taught it for 5 years. Some parents
came for word processing lessons. During this time I put the staff payroll on to a PC,
paying them direct into their banks, using a BACS file sent over a normal phone line. This
was very early days for using a PC for that kind of work. But when the school accountant
was due to retire, I was asked to take on that job, where I put the school accounts on to a PC,
including parent billing. I was in this position for several years, only retiring in 1995.
After that, I did various stints of unpaid voluntary work, including for a local Citizens Advice
Bureau, a toy library, and as a classroom assistant at a local primary school
Helen Jackson (nee Clark): Read More »
Paul Kelley
I worked in the Engineering Training Department July 64-August 68 – first at Minerva
Road and then at Radley House in South Ealing. I began on LEO III (never worked on the
326 or 360) until switching to System 4 in early 65.
I have in my possession a complete set of LEO III logic diagrams and microprograms. In
2013 I began documenting, in extreme detail, how the various subsystems within LEO III
operated. I had available to me the original text of my 1964 notes (and those of others) to
assist me. I was intrigued as to whether or not, after 39 years, I could still do it. By way
of illustration, attached is a Word doc of my efforts on the Coordinator which I ran by
Tony Morgan in December 2013. It won’t be too meaningful as there are extensive
hyperlinked references to the logic diagrams and other documents.
Also attached is an image of my folder structure. I include this in order to point out that
EVERYTHING I have has been scanned (1.5gb total) and to draw attention to the Orig
Text folder which contains all my notes of 1964 vintage for all the LEO III subsystems.
In sum, I think it would be appropriate to have a discussion with someone as to how best
to dispose of all the above so as to ensure that it is not lost. Some of it may be redundant
as it may already exist in the ‘archive’. Given that I am now 80 and the sole carer for my
wife, time to indulge oneself in this project is at something of a premium and whether I
will be able to finish the project problematical at best. In light of these circumstances I
would be happy to send a memory stick with everything on it and take advice on how best
to proceed with the hard copy versions
Mike Josephs: Beginnings
This is in the nature of a bit of self – indulgence. I want to talk about my early days in the
fledgling computer industry back in 1957 and thereabouts. Before doing so I want to
welcome a new recruit to our circulation list: David Caminer, who must surely be the most
senior of us all, as he was a warrior in the Desert Rats back in 1942. His name, you can be
sure, will appear in what follows.
While the rest of you will probably have been doing something conventional, like medicine
accountancy or ordinary business, I joined a new subsidiary of J Lyons & co which had gone
into the trade of making and selling business computers. I will now admit that with my
freshly minted maths degree, I had hoped to join IBM but they quickly spotted that I lacked
the necessary skills in dissimulation to suit their style of operation.
To me the whole thing was like a job and a hobby and a high pressure trade school all
wrapped into one intriguing parcel, made all the more so by David Caminer’s role as king of
the systems and marketing areas. The business was so young, but he and his managers
seemed to know so much about everything. They were an incredible gang of people, full of
unexpected talents.
I never really understood how the whole thing had come about. We were given some briefs
on the company’s short history, and various names were mentioned in tones of awe, but we
were too busy worrying about where we were going, to concern ourselves with what was
already long past. Anyway I left LEO Computers after 8 years, during which it had been
merged with English Electric and Marconi, and effective control had passed out of the hands
of the original senior team.
So why am I suddenly rambling on like some old codger reflecting on the errors of his youth,
when as everyone knows I am supposed to be writing a deconstruction of the Financial
Ombudsman Service to submit to the Commons Treasury Committee? The fault lies entirely
with an authoress, Georgina Ferry, whose field is the history of various significant
enterprises. She recently published her latest entitled “A Computer Called LEO”, and to my
surprise it is very good indeed.
It is not just a picture of the exciting days of a new technology which in the space of 50 years
we have all come to take for granted, but simultaneously it charts the decline of a massively
successful family owned food business which could not adapt itself to the demands of that
new era. Although I encountered some of Lyons’ strange ways, I knew too little about
business elsewhere to put them into an overall context, but the book makes clear just how
feudal and paternalistic the whole operation was. When push came to shove, the youngest
family spriglet ranked above the most senior ‘employee’ director. And those senior
employees wanted it that way. They saw themselves as squires to the family knights, not
ambitious for themselves and devoted entirely to the family interest.
As a result, a degree of real humility percolated down through the ranks of the management
and was imbibed by the fractious juniors like myself. If John Simmons, hyper-competent
administrator and famed initiator of the whole Lyons computing enterprise, saw himself as no
more than a capable family servant, who was anyone else to put on airs and arrogance? The
contrast with executive culture and self promotion at the start of the 21st century could not be
greater. I suspect that many of those old Lyons managers (though not us LEO people) would
have fitted into Ancient Egypt without a ripple.
The Lyons company’s self-image was of an immensely competent enterprise which had
forgotten more about running food businesses than anyone else had ever learned. At its heart
was an administrative machine that kept rigorous track of every bit of raw material and every
hour of labour, and reported profit margins on a weekly basis. They, like the Marks and
Spencer of the same era, were always looking for better, cheaper, more effective ways of
doing things, so they found room for men of imagination and energy who would challenge
established practices and propose better ones.
Unfortunately, marketing, finance and business strategy were not subject to the same types of
intellectual discipline, but they were the fiefs of family members who reigned like Dukes
over major parts of the whole empire and whose word could not be gainsaid.
As I read the book, I came to understand the strange conjunction of circumstances that led
this food company into pioneering the application of digital computers to the operation of
major businesses, both their own and other businesses with forward looking management.
Simmons (also a Cambridge maths graduate) had come to realise that the process of
administrative improvement was blocked by the lack of suitable office equipment:
everything available up to 1950 was just too damned dumb, and needed the work broken up
into excruciatingly small stages. He realised that the new-fangled computers, just emerging
from the labs of leading universities, could offer the solution to his problems.
His solution was simplicity itself: offer some funding to the Cambridge computer wizards,
and in return get their advice and co-operation in designing and building Lyons own machine
which would be tuned to business work the way the academic machines were tuned to
scientific computations. Lyons and Simmons were even more ‘can-do’ than the American
Marines.
As I think about this unlikely set-up into which I so innocently plunged, I realise that even
today, after all the vicissitudes, some of my good friends date from that era: Frank and Ralph
Land, Alan Jacobs, and perhaps one or two more whose origins I have forgotten. I might
even include Robin Fairlie who made a huge success at Remington Rand/ Univac after David
Caminer refused to be persuaded by my recommendation that Robin be taken onboard.
Now the engine of this unlikely subsidiary was not Research or Production, but was indeed
the Systems Department run by David Caminer, who had learned his trade under Simmons in
Lyons own Systems Department. That is where I started as a humble programmer, learning
at the feet of people like Frank and Alan. These strange but clever people cared about only
one thing: ‘Did it work?’, by which they meant ‘Did it do the job we had promised the
customer?’ This was a very strange idea in the computing world of the day, where it was
taken for granted that nothing would ever work first time, and certainly nowhere near the
original budget.
But this was the philosophy of the Lyons people and we imbibed it from them like mother’s
milk. Neither intricate requirements nor unreliable equipment could be allowed to stand in
the way of doing the job properly. They were just obstacles to be surmounted. If you didn’t
know how, then ask. If no one knew how, then work it out for yourself. The product of all
this was a remarkable type of person, not so different from what you might find in a
university engineering department. LEO people were unassuming but intimidating in their
confidence that they could solve any problem that was capable of solution. And they proved
again and again that the confidence was justified.
Looking back, it is easy to see that what was really special about LEO was the systems knowhow, and that ‘attitude’. It today’s parlance we would say that they were without equal as
systems and project engineers, and however good the youngsters were David Caminer was
even better. Of course, he had the advantage of the right sort of basic training, which we all
skipped because there wasn’t time for that old fashioned ‘organisation & methods’ stuff.
That was the business that LEO should really have tried to be, but the directors had got the
computer building bug and could never throw off the habit. Other people picked up the idea
of systems consultancy and made fortunes doing badly what LEO could do well, but LEO
wanted to be in the production business as well, which is something that burns real capital.
Of course the mergers went badly, because the paternalist Lyons Board had cut their losses
and cut their ties with LEO with the ruthlessness that would make a 21st century capitalist
quite proud. None of the LEO directors even knew what was going down – they were sold
out without warning!
I always seemed to be dragged into the strategic errors that senior management insisted on
making, like setting up an operation in Johannesburg when we didn’t have enough of ‘the
right stuff’ to cope with the UK market. It was only when I read the book that I realised that
DC and I thought the same about that little jaunt, even if it did give me a year in the RSA.
Reverting back, to when I returned from South Africa, I had to serve a two year stint as
Caminer’s technical fixer, which was sometimes a non-job because he was his own best fixer
as all the rest will gladly testify. It also meant that I was under his feet a bit too often, which
was widely regarded as something to be avoided if at all possible. Anyway, as a reward for
sticking it out, and helping to get some advanced computers into production (something
which Georgina talks about while neglecting to mention me by name for some reason) I was
promoted into product planning in the Research Division, which I now learn from Georgina
was a bit of merger politics that was not expected to produce anything.
There I turned myself into a pale copy of David C. and ran around like a demented bluebottle
making enemies in all directions, but coming up with a credible scheme that unfortunately
was just a bit before its time. Meanwhile the real version saw which way the corporate
politics were going and espoused the proposal that the English Electric brigade wanted to
hear. Our work in Research wasn’t entirely wasted, because ten years later after yet more
mergers, it was incorporated into a line of machines under the ICL label.
That was about as close as I got to corporate glory, but as they say, it was a great learning
experience and helped prepare me for the rough and tumble of management consultancy. But
what I didn’t realise was how much of British industrial history in the 20th century was
encapsulated in the strange case of Lyons and its LEO computers. Do read Georgina Ferry’s
book if these things interest you at all.