Robert E Peel – Died 2015. He was an intrinsic part of the Master Routine team with such luminaries as Adrian Rymell, Colin Tully, Nigel Dolby, Sheila Milne and I’m sure a few others whose names I have forgotten. The Intercode Translator team interacted closely with the Master programmers and I remember Bob as a thoroughly pleasant and competent member of that illustrious team. I think he worked on the Allocator/Loader routine which had to take the translator output and do something sensible with it. I remember nothing but the great professional relationship we had with him.
Announcements of deaths and obituaries
Announcements of deaths and obituaries
Margaret Perrot died on 28th November 2020.
She was a pioneer with the service bureau of LEO at Hartree House, and she was the last person to go to Cadby Hall to do a small program amendment on Leo 1 just before it was scrapped.
John Pinkerton – 1919-1997 After doing research into radar systems and receiving a PhD at Cambridge recommended by Maurice Wilkes to Lyons as the Engineer to design and develop. He joined Lyons in January 1949 and started to build the small team of engineers which succeeded in building LEO I as a machine based on the EDSAC design but significantly modified for business data processing. In 1959 he was appointed a Director of LEO Computersx Limited, but resigned on the merger creating EELM. On the further creation of ICL he took charge of research into the product lines being developed by EELM. Subsequently he took a leading role in the development of International Standards and represented the UK in bodies such as the European Union’s ESPRIT project. He also became Chairman of the editorial Board of the ICL Technical Journal. As a tribute to his outstanding qualities the IET inaugurated an annual Pinkerton Lecture and the WCIT set up an annual Pinkerton Award to the years leading apprentice. A short biographical sketch can be found on page 208 of Peter Bird’s LEO: the World’s First Business Computer. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (ODNB), published an obituary September 2004 both in print and online written by Martin Campbell-Kelly.
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/CCS/res/res19.htm#g
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=707576
http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107600/oh149jmp.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://www.cliftoncollege.com/external/clifton-memories/john-pinkerton-and-the-first-business-computer/
Elwyn Rees – Passed away on Jan 2 2024
In the 1960’s Elwyn was a pioneer in the use of computers in education and was the recipient of the HO Wills LEO computer after it was decommissioned and donated to Linwood Secondary school in Leicestershire. He then proceeded to repurpose the machine as the first computer assisted learning machine in the UK in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. As part of that he founded an early Computer Science class at that school. Elwyn went on to apply the lessons learned on that system and applied them to micro computer applications in the 1980’s as personal computing developed. He published extensively on the topic until his retirement. In later years he donated a number of artefacts to the LEO association including a mercury delay line storage unit, which is in the collection of LEO parts at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley ParK.
He is survived by his son, David, his daughter Emma and his three grandchildren, Bronwyn, Alice and Isabel.
Clive Richards, CBE, Financial and technology entrepreneur, philanthropist born 1st September 1937, died 16th April 2021 Twenty years before the Big Bang in the City of London in 1986, there was a small but important bang at the City offices of Wedd Durlacher Mordaunt & Co.
Extract from obituary published in Times newspaper on 1st July 2021at https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/7a71c506-d9cc-11eb-8f14-0bb645f59db0?shareToken=3b74eedfc49523fed3df4d7d3db2fab7
“In 1966 the stock-jobbing company exemplified the traditional image of the gentleman stockbroker who did most of his business over a long lunch. But Clive Richards, the managing partner, signalled the electronic revolution that was to come by buying a LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) III, the first computer in the City of London for £140,000 (£2.7 million in today’s money). Richards continued to invest heavily in information technology in the Seventies after he moved on to Rothschild Investment Trust, financing the development of the Datasolve Computer Bureau, a mainframe computer that was hired out by companies.
Anthony Salmon – 1916-2000 A member of the ruling Salmon and Gluckstein family, founders of J. Lyons & Co, was assigned Managing Director of LEO Computers Limited on its foundation in 1954 and became a main board Director of the parent company in 1955. He played an active role in promoting LEO sales using his extensive business contacts. Ceased active involvement after merger of LEO with English Electric in 1963, though nominally Vice-Chair of merged company. A short biographical sketch can be found on page 208 of Peter Bird’s LEO: the World’s First Business Computer.
http://www.kzwp.com/lyons.pensioners/obituary2S.htm (page 1)
Ann Sayce (nee Tunbridge). She worked at Charles House (GPO) on LEO 326 between 1964 -67 -note after this she worked at Westminster Bank and CEGB-Victoria, writing IBM as she says, “rubbish”. Finally teaching computer studies at schools and adult education courses.
Ray Shaw
LAST OF THE ORIGINAL DESIGN TEAM THAT BUILT LEO
Ray Shaw, the last remaining link with the original design team that built the world’s first business computer, LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) has died aged 98.
Recruited into J Lyons & Co in 1949 for his expertise in radar and radio telecommunications by the LEO hardware team leader, Dr John Pinkerton, he was involved initially with the development of special test equipment and testing schedules for basic units within LEO, but later worked on the design of many of the 90 circuits that went into the early LEO machines.
He went on to do design work on the LEO II development that enabled the system to operate four times faster by interleaving the pulses from the mercury delay line storage without major changes to the processor.
Shaw left Lyons in 1956 to work down under with, briefly, Amalgamated Wireless of Australia on component standardisation and specification, and then joined the University of Sydney Physics Department at The Adolf Basser Computing Laboratory to work on magnetic tape backing storage for the university’s computer, pioneering the use of error-correcting code techniques to minimise the loss of information due to magnetic tape flaws.
Returning to England in 1960 he joined English Electric Computers in Kidsgrove, Staffordshire, to work on the design of the KDF9 computer and then, by a strange twist of fate, found himself back with Pinkerton’s research group and LEO after English Electric’s takeover of the Lyons computer business in 1963.
Work on standards
His later work with LEO involved working on a number of high-profile projects involving advanced data transmission techniques, including research into packet-switching techniques and data transmission standards. The European Computer Manufacturers’ Association (ECMA) had a series of Technical Committees (TC’s) and Shaw was vice chairman of TC9 that was looking at data transmission and error correction techniques that would in time become part of the multi-layer model that supports the internet.
Raymond Denby Shaw was born in Ilford, Essex, the son of Eliza Shaw, nee Pember, and Frederick Alfred Shaw. He left school at 16 with little in the way of qualifications apart from a facility for mathematics.
He joined Jacob White & Co, a privately owned electrical and mechanical engineering workshop. Then, in 1940, he went on to work on the testing of thermionic radio valves with Standard Telephones & Cable Company in Sidcup, Kent. His main ambition at the time was to become involved in radio research, which led to a move to the Electro Physical Laboratories in Hendon, London, that were engaged in R&D work relating to photovoltaic detecting devices and systems. And thence to Vacuum Science Products at Norwood Junction, a company concerned with the development and manufacture of silver-caesium photoelectric devices.
In 1943, Shaw volunteered to serve in the Royal Air Force and was trained as a radar mechanic, becoming involved with airborne radar equipment and navigational aids and air-to-ground cathode ray tube displays both in the UK and in the Far East theatres of war. Demobilised with the rank of sergeant in 1947, he returned to his pre-service employers continuing work on photovoltaic photoelectric devices and studies in radio and telecommunication engineering.
Following the merger that created ICL in 1968 and through to 1980, when he retired from ICL, he was involved in the formulation of mainframe computing system requirements for future products. He was also prominent as the leader of an advanced team of trouble-shooters.
Founding member of BCS
A founding member of the British Computer Society, Ray Shaw’s many interests were reflected in a wide range of other memberships, including the Chartered Institute of British Management, the Defence Electronics History Society, and the British Society for the History of Mathematics.
He was married twice, but had no children. His first marriage, to Ann Twyford in 1952, ended in divorce in the 1970s. The second, to Muriel Fussel in 1982, ended with her death from cancer in 2005. His one sister, Eileen, pre-deceased him in 2015. He is survived by her children, Yvonne and Alan, and by five other nephews and nieces from Muriel’s side of the family.
Raymond Tempest Shaw, b. 17 April 1924, d. 27 November 2022
Remembering Ray Shaw a Video of John Daine’s presentation
Also on Dropbox
Ray Shaw (far left in front) with members of the early LEO build team, including its leader, Dr John Pinkerton (middle row, second from left with glasses)
An addendum from Dag Spicer
Thank you so much sending me this – I really appreciate the extra effort you make to include those of us who are a bit off-piste in terms of time zone!
What a wonderful presentation by John Daines. Please pass along with deep admiration my best wishes to him for a touching and informative talk.
I’ve downloaded the whole meeting and will be keeping it in my personal research archives – it’s a fine source of information on LEO, as are every LEO meetings.
The discussion about whether “LEO was cost effective” was interesting. My feeling on that is more relevant than whether it made sense economically was that Lyons would not have been able to grow at the rate it did without computers – they were facing a crisis of complexity that only computer methods could tackle. My $0.02. :_)
Thank you again for this amazing talk, Peter. I am honoured to be included.
With warmest regards,
Dag Spicer
Senior Curator
Computer History Museum
Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
1401 N. Shoreline Blvd.
Mountain View CA 94043
John Simmons – 1902-1985 after gaining a first class degree in Mathematics from Cambridge University he was recruited by George Booth, Lyons company secretary as a Management Trainee and statistician with a brief to review and develop the Lyons business processes. Under his tutelage many innovations to business processes were introduced and in 1932 he established the Systems Research Office. In 1947 he sent two of his managers to the USA to study if Lyons could learn from American business processes. The outcome of the visit was the famous Standingford/Thompson report suggesting the possibility of computers as an engine for making the company more efficient. He used his own reputation and authority to endorse the idea and the resulting collaboration with Cambridge University to build LEO. He was appointed to the Lyons Board in 1954 as an Employee Director and a year later as a full Director. His reputation in the business world was an important factor in the establishment of LEO, the product of a catering company, as one of the leading computer supplier in the UK and further afield. A biographical sketch can be found on pages 209 o 210 of Peter Bird’s LEO: the World’s First Business Computer, and his profile is included in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (ODNB) written by Georgina Ferry and published online September 2005.
http://www.oldbrightonians.com/notable-obs/business/john-simmons-bc.-1916.html
Ox ford Dictionary of National Biography ODNB
David Caminer adds:
Handwritten notes by David Caminer in preparation for his Pinkerton Lecture and transcribed by his daughter Hilary, hon. secretary LEO Computer Society January 2021. Words in brackets below are guesses at what was on the original manuscript.
This may well be the last time that we of the small band who conceived the first business computer, built it and first put it to work. And so it seems appropriate to put aside reticence for a moment and to say a few concise words about my colleagues.
First then to Simmons. I have already spoken about him as the architect of Lyons office systems and (its) infrastructure. Without the enormous respect that he had gained from ‘the family’ as the controlling group of the Company was known, it is more than unlikely that LEO would have been proceeded with. He was known as a man who could be relied upon utterly and that when he made a proposal it had been completely thought through and would be carried to fruition, within a fixed time- frame and within budget. He was confident enough to advise the family of his intentions more than he needed to do. He believed very firmly in carrying everyone along with him and when LEO was actually being built he made certain that it should not be regarded as a Frankenstein and first invited all the management and supervisors of the offices to see it in progress. He promised that no one would lose their job because of it, arguing that it could take time for the Computer to replace labour and by that time there would be natural wastage.
He himself was a formidable person. He had glacier blue eyes that were transfixing. He was very quietly spoken. I don’t remember him ever raising his voice. He was a tidy man in every sense. I recall his large mahogany desk. Always clear when we entered his room. He would then take the paper to be discussed from his top right hand drawer. It was always there, in place. His questions were searching/He was not always satisfied with the answers, but his natural courtesy did much to check his impatience. If we didn’t altogether agree with what was being proposed, he would smile rather thinly and declare ‘I hear what you say!’ If we were unwise enough to continue on this same track, he would repeat ‘I hear what you say’ this time with a note of resignation and dismissal. He was a totally logical man. Thinking the impossible was no problem for him as long as it could be logically supported. He brought his mathematical disciplines to his management chair. These were not just … but a continuum in his style of thought.
John Simmons was a very private man. He was always the captain of the ship, but was not at all well known except to his senior officers. Many working in his large offices would not have been able to recognise him. He only very seldom ventured onto the shop floor. He was the son of missionaries and, without wearing his faith on his sleeve, we were very aware of the responsibility he bore for the people working for him. He was particularly conscious of the situation in which he had placed the small army of machine operators, all girls and women that had grown up. They were the counterparts of the operators in the continuous band factories, but as he noted, while those within factory operations could chat while they carried out their repetitive operations, the accounting … or … …groups had to keep their minds on the work all the time. When he discovered it, I don’t know, but he found that in the drive for efficiency, he had implanted drudgery in the offices. He quickly saw the potential of the computer to eradicate that drudgery and he seized up it. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/i2pncloi68lpa3jywtrrg/John-Simmons-appreciation.doc?dl=0&rlkey=qut7r1fol6k21ei49g5v1l7yx
John Simmons – 1902-1985: Read More »
His wife Judy writes: “John read Mathematics at Trinity , Cambridge but changed to English after the first year as the school he had been evacuated to during the war had not covered Applied Maths and he found at Trinity that he had too much to catch up on . It says a lot for his versatility that he was able to graduate in English after only two years study . After an abortive few months in advertising he was lucky enough to spot an advertisement for some new fangled thing called a computer and he started his career at LEO in 1956. After a period spent programming he moved to the training department under Robin Gibson and found his true home starting at Hartree House , then in Ealing and finally at Beaumont until 1990 when he had to retire following a devastating brain haemorrhage . He was wheelchair bound and disabled in many ways but has survived nearly 30 years through grit and determination, living a fulfilling life, never feeling sorry for himself but concentrating on what he could do rather than that which he could no longer do. There may be some oldies who remember him”. Peter Byford adds “many will remember him as Training Manager at Hartree House and his ability to make nervous applicants and LEO recruits feel at ease.”
John Smythson, born 1931, died December 2019 aged 88: Read More »