A Computer Called LEO
Lyons Teashops and the World’sFirst Office Computer
GEORGINA FERRY
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MEET THE £150,000 ROBOT THAT KNOWS ALL THE ANSWERS.
Puzzled? LEO the Brain Will Do Your Thinking For You.
Robots have begun taking over work which is too complicated or too laborious for human beings. In cold print this may seem fanciful. But now one is confronted by LEO, Britain’s new electronic brain … He is the only one of his kind on commercial work in the world.
Evening News, 16 February 1954
What is there in a name? Plenty if it is LEO, for it is a name coined at the dawn of computer technology, that has carried with it a long list of first achievements. For that reason alone it merits perpetuation.
Engineering, 5 March 1965
To some, it was a supreme irrelevance, a quixotic venture into the unknown by a respectable family business that ought to have known better. To others, it was an enterprise of boldness and vision, whose ultimate failure resulted from the conservatism and short-sightedness of others, and whose story contains lessons that succeeding generations would do well to learn.
LEO was a computer. It burst into the British public consciousness through a snowstorm of popular articles in February 1954, although its genesis lay some years earlier. It was not the first computer in the world, by any of a number of possible definitions. As a piece of electronic engineering it was not fundamentally original. LEO and its creators deserve their place in history not because of what it was but because of what it did. For LEO was the first computer in the world to be harnessed to the task of managing a business. That business was J. Lyons & Co., renowned the length and breadth of the land for its fine tea and cakes, available in grocers’ shops everywhere but savoured especially in the Lyons teashops, a chain of more than two hundred high street cafés.
LEO was designed and built by Lyons’s own engineers, and its first programs were written by Lyons managers before the computer programmer existed as a job description. At the time, the few who knew anything about computers thought of them as tools for scientists and mathematicians. LEO was a novelty in that its circuits hummed not with non-linear equations but with the hours worked and rates of pay for the bakers who produced, among other things, 36 miles of Swiss roll per day. Rather than calculating missile trajectories (though it could do that, too), LEO grappled with the task of restocking each teashop every day with no more and no less than it needed to keep its customers supplied with bread rolls, boiled beef and ice cream. It even turned its attention to ensuring that Lyons continued to produce the perfect blends of tea on which so much of the company’s reputation rested.
Fifty years later it is hard to imagine a time when the computerisation of such activities was remarkable or even revolutionary. Today we use computers not only for all forms of record-keeping and financial management but to go shopping, to teach children, to fly aeroplanes (and to write books). They have become an extension of more or less every human cognitive capacity, and invaded every area of human activity. Off-the-shelf software packages have removed the need to understand how computers work or to speak their language – instead it is we who are programmed to point and click. But to reach this point we had to start somewhere, and LEO was in at the beginning.
LEO’s development brought about the convergence of two histories that until that point had been quite separate: the history of computers, and the history of office management and office machines. In this it anticipated by at least five years IBM, a giant of the office machines business in the first half of the twentieth century but a relative latecomer to commercial computers. LEO’s creators were acutely conscious of their pioneering role, and were not slow to exploit the opportunities of their position. Soon after LEO’s first public debut, with several applications