- Tony Carrol Operator at Wills Tobacco. My involvement with LEO started when I was a schoolboy. I had taken my “O” levels and was going into the 6th form but I wanted to mix Classics and Science and was told in no uncertain terms that this was not possible. I could not just do Science as the only chemistry exam I passed was by ignoring the H2O s etc and just concentrated on the maths. I thought this was NOT chemistry. So I ended up doing Classics which did not suit me. Through a friend of my mother’s I went for a job as a statistician but did not get it (thank goodness) and then I heard that there ware vacancies for trainee computer operators in W. D. & H. O. Wills. This sounded interesting and I was fortunate to be taken on and started in September 1959 ( on £265 per annum ). I rapidly progressed up to Shift Leader and stayed doing that role until 1969/70 the boss of the department (Bob Brett, with whom I am still in touch today) wanted to move me to Systems and Programming. And so I moved, thoroughly enjoying that time, and stayed in IT until I retired for the second time in 2003(?).
One interesting occurrence happened on 10th July 1968, but cannot be part of my talk on LEO, was that our computer (a KDF9 by this time) was flooded to a depth of about two feet. As luck would have it, the workload on another KDF9 had just been transferred onto an IBM 360 (?) and this empty KDF9 was only about 7 or 8 miles from our site. We used it for one month, burning out the motor on a brand new printer in that month, and then returned to “our” KDF9 which had been successfully returned to life with, I believe, only two new boards. I also remember that we only lost a few mag tapes.