LEO editor

BBC Radio 5/Live Tuesday, 29 November 2011. Short piece by Jammilah Knowles on
the pioneering LEO enterprise. LEO: Making history.
BBC – Outriders: LEO: Making history

Celebrating LEO, the world’s first business computer, Google Europe Blog,,
November 17, 2011
http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/celebrating-leo-worlds-first-business.html

ITV (LWT London area only ) is to show a series of 8 programmes called London
Home Movies on Sunday afternoons. The series will start on 9th November 2012 at 5.30.
Several members have contributed to the series and Trevor Hughes’s contribution is
included in the first programme.
References to LEO will appear in the programme devoted to Work which will appear
on Sunday November 30th at 5.30 pm.
Interviews with David Caminer and Peter Byford will be included with the LEO film
and it will include some footage of a home movie taken by Brian Eaton in the sixties, of
LEO 3 together with an interview with Brian

An episode of Revolutionaries, a co-production of the Computer History Museum
Silicon Valley and KQED television, Published on Jul 6, 2012 by Computer History.
The subject is the contribution to computing of Sir Maurice Wilkes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9DrKQ2isIk&list=UUHDr4RtxwA1KqKGwxgdK4Vg&index=5&feature=plcp

Live Chat NOW: LEO, the British computer that roared, 28th June 2013 (see
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/26/live_chat_leo/). Gavin Clarke, editor of The
Register and members of the audience interview Frank and Ralph Land online in real
time. The outcome is rather messy as questions and answers do not come out in a proper
sequence.

UK Computer Heritage
at Google HQ in London 1st July 2013 to celebrate UK contribution to Information and
Communications Technology. Featured the Video commissioned by Google for the 60th
anniversary of LEO held at the Science
Museum:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLG7EqWtzeIhXjSD4SdfPx1WQICKZMVcP4

BBC Magazine. Broadcast August 1st 2013 BBC Radio 4 at 13.45 as part of a 10
episode series by Lucy Kellaway entitled Lucy Kellaway’s History of Office Life and
explores the changes brought about in the office by computers and this episode starts
with a brief review of the LEO story including a photo of LEO I.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23509153

BBC 4 The I.T. Girls
August 2013, 11.00 am BBC Radio 4. Fronted by Martha Lane-Fox its contributors
include, Mary Coombs, Dame Stephanie Shirley, Ann Moffat and Tilly Blythe. From
the 1950s to the mid-1970s in Britain, many of the pioneers of early computing were
women. This was a highly skilled new world of work providing opportunities that were
often in sharp contrast to the established norms of post-war British life, with new
technology helping drive social change.
Mary Coombs was the first woman to program the world’s first commercially
available business computer: the Lyons LEO. She tells us what it was like to work
on this machine – which was the size of a room.
In 1962 Dame Stephanie Shirley founded a programming company, Freelance
Programmers, which only employed women. She became a very successful figure in
the industry.
Ann Moffat started her career at Kodak in 1959. She programmed the black box
flight recorders for Concorde and wrote missile programmes for Polaris.
The Science Museum’s Keeper of Technologies and Engineering, Dr Tilly Blyth,
explains the significance of her museum’s collection of machines that changed these
women’s lives.
Martha Lane Fox presents the programme. In 1998 she co-founded Lastminute.com,
and become one of the pioneers of the dot com era. See
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b038hfkx

BBC News Channel: Celebrating the UK’s Computer Pioneers.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7521868.stm A Brief account of the role played
by the UK in the development of computers from Bletchley to LEO.

BBC Radio 4 Extra, 2nd November, 2013, 9.00-12.00 am and 7.00- 10.pm. A three
hour compilation of computing history from the BBC radio archives, fronted by Maggie
Philbin at Bletchley Park. The programme started with Charles Babbage, and Ada
Lovelace, went on to Bletchley and the second world war code breaking exploits, then
the LEO story from the Make Hally LEO episode in the four-part story of the Dawn of
Computers (about 20 minutes), Clive Sinclair and the Micro Computer revolution,
Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web, and finally the spread of Social Computing with
Facebook and Twitter. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03g8lxl