Books

Hicks, Mar (2017) ‘Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost its Edge in Computing’, MIT Press. Marie Hicks, an American Academic, has produced a well-researched and in many ways fascinating account of the British Computer Industry from its birth at the beginning of World War 2 code-breaking at Bletchley Park to the demise of ICL in the mid-1970s. As such it includes many references to LEO including reports of interviews with LEO employees. However, the focus is on British Government computing, and in particular on the making of staffing policy in the Civil Service. Whilst the account is often interesting and provides an insight into the social history of the Civil Service as it enters the Information Age its basic hypothesis embodied in the title of the book is at best dubious. http://programmedinequality.com/

Hollingdale, S.H. & Toothill , G.C., (1965), Electronic Computers. Penguin (Pelican) Books, London. This early book on the history of computers includes a number of references to LEO. See pages 230 and 281-282, and a photograph. It is a brief but accurate account noting payroll and teashop ordering. What is also interesting, in a book published in 1965, is the absence of any mention of war—time computing in Bletchley or any computer innovations outside the USA and UK. A surprising number of pages are devoted to analogue computers. A second edition was published in 1975. See Electronic Computers

IEEE History Foundation. Milestones By Year Dedicated And Region comprises a variety of relevant material related to the interests of the IEEE. It includes references to LEO and includes an oral history of LEO programmer Betty
Cooper, http://ethw.org/Oral-History:Betty_Cooper

Jones, Capers (2014) ‘The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering’, Addison-Wesley. Capers Jones’s book is a monumental history of computers and computing with a prime focus on ‘software engineering’. Jones has an introductory chapter which deals with the pre-history from the beginning of civilisation to 1930, then chapters dealing with each decade up to 2013. His chapter on the 1950s includes the LEO story, brief (pages 85, 86, in a 452 page book), but giving some weight to the place of LEO in computing history. See Capers Jones

Kavanagh, J., (2007) ‘BCS – Celebrating 50 years’, British Computer Society. 82 pages including a chapter titled ‘Birth of an Industry and the BCS’, which features Maurice Wilkes, photo of LEO I and potted history of LEO. More info at Google Books

Lavington, Simon H. (1980) ‘Early British Computers: The Story of Vintage Computers and The People Who Built Them’, Manchester University Press, http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/EarlyBritish.html#TOC
Chapter 13, pages 68-77, gives a brief history of LEO and English Electric, including a timeline.

Lavington, Simon, (2011), Moving Targets: Elliott-Automation and the Dawn of the Computer Age 1947 – 67, Computer History, Springer. Although the book is primarily a history of Elliott-Automation it has a number of references to Lyons and LEO. See Google Books

Lavington, Simon (ed.) (2012) ‘Alan Turing and his Contemporaries’, British Computer Society. 111 pages, summarises the background to all the early British stored-program projects from 1945 – 1951. See Amazon

Lavington, S., (2019) Early Computing in Britain, Ferranti Ltd. and Government Funding, 1948 — 1958, Springer Computer History Series. A valuable addition to the exposure UK computing developments in the early years of computers with a focus on the initiatives taken by the Ferranti Company, in particular with their Mark I. LEO is only referred to in Appendix D, see https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030151027

Lean, T, (2016), Electronic Dreams: How 1980s Britain learned to love the computer, Bloomsberry/Sigma. The book includes references to LEO and its early success. Further References or Buy