STAFF WERE NERVOUS ABOUT THEIR ABILITY TO COPE WITH THE NEW SYSTEMS
“After the war, Simmons sent two of his lieutenants to America to see what changes had taken place in America in the way businesses were run,” Land explained. The two Lyons staffers, Oliver Standingford and Raymond Thompson, saw the first electronic computer known as ENIAC, and began to see the business potential of this extraordinary machine.
The duo also learned that they could have stayed closer to home, as the University of Cambridge was developing its own electronic computer, the EDSAC. Lyons eventually donated £3,000 to borrow the design in order to build its own version, dubbed the Lyons Electronic Office — and becoming the first business to automate office functions such as payroll and accounting. “It’s the first time a business company that has nothing to do with computers in the first place decides to produce a machine for their own purposes,” said Dr Giuseppe Primiero, senior lecturer in computing science at Middlesex University London, which runs a LEO-themed graduate scholarship.
Land notes that the LEO was similar to EDSAC, but specifically designed for business processes, with “lots of input and output and much less computing” than academics would have required. LEO had 3,000 electronic valves and relied on multiple reams of tape and punch cards for input – but in return it cut the average payroll calculation time from eight minutes per employee to a handful of seconds.
After the initial trials, the machine was used alongside pen-and-paper accounting methods to work out any bugs. Once it was moved into regular use, staff had to be retrained. “A lot of people who were used to computing the standard payroll would not be able to [use LEO] without training,” said Primiero.
Despite this, Lyons claimed no jobs were lost — they simply changed from recording data on paper to creating inputs for the computer, with the time saved shifted to real-time analysis and accelerating operations.
One of those trained to use the machines was Ralph Land, Frank’s brother and the bureau manager responsible for the LEO 111, after the computer-making division had been spun out of Lyons. He revealed the computers weren’t always popular among staff forced to work with them. “The older staff found it difficult to adapt to the computer input and outputs and, up to a point, tried to continue to use the computer information with their former methods,” he said. “There seemed to be little effect on the number employed for some time, although staff were nervous about their ability to cope with the new systems and feared for their jobs.
“Staff turnover rates were, in any case, quite high,” he added. “There was no enthusiasm amongst the staff for the new computer-based systems — although the local management had a much more positive attitude.”
A LANDMARK OPERATION
Computers weren’t always forced upon a reluctant workforce, however — architects and building engineers had been keen to automate the mathematical drudgery of their work for years before a dream project gave them the perfect chance.
At one meeting recorded in its company journal in the 1950s, engineers at iconic architectural firm Arup debated whether it was time to start weaving computers into their work, said Yanni Loukissas, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech and
the author of Co-Designers: Cultures of Computer Simulation in Architecture. “Because computers are inherently systematic and logical,” he said, the architects argued that “they’re going to make us more systematic in our work and hold us to account. And that’s a good thing.”
The decision was forced in 1957 by the winning entry for a new performance venue in Australia, the design for which was no more than a few shapes sketched onto paper. “There was a kind of crisis in that project, because Jørn Utzon who had won the competition with basically a piece of paper, had put forward a design that engineers didn’t know how to evaluate structurally – there wasn’t a kind of consistent geometry,” Loukissas explained. “And engineers didn’t necessarily know what to do with it.”
Ove Arup, the founder of the firm, wasn’t the sort to duck a challenge, and volunteered to rework the project from sketch to reality. That included using computers to analyse the structural demands of the design, as well as affixing sensors to models to collect wind and other data, analysing the results using a computer rather than by hand. Later estimates suggested that it would have taken ten years longer to complete the mammoth project without computer assistance.
The company didn’t own a computer at the time, so rented use of a Ferranti Pegasus Mark 1 at the Mancunian computer-maker’s London base around the corner from the Arup offices. (The company later invested in its own computers, with the first dubbed “Mumbo
Jumbo” by Ove Arup, who wrote a slogan for it to encourage shy employees to make use of the machine: “When in trouble come to Mum, Mum will do your little sum.”)
The Sydney Opera House was a perfect “guinea pig” to push architecture into the digital era. “Computers represented this professional opportunity for engineers and later architects to reimagine their roles and change their work, so that the computer became a co-designer, a partner in the process,” Loukissas said. “That was going to change the design process in a way that was going to alleviate certain kinds of labour that humans didn’t want to do.”
Furthermore, Loukissas argued, architects and engineers saw the computer as a way of adding “an extra layer of legitimacy” to their work, to modernise their profession. Now, some have traded engineering skills for software specialisms. “People have chosen to invest in learning software as opposed to other things,” Loukissas said. “In architecture, you can see there’s been a tradeoff where architects are investing heavily in teaching software as opposed to history and theory.”
Has it changed how we design buildings? Not all that much, Loukissas believes. “We can design more elaborate structures today than we could in the past, and there’s the idea that if you can simulate the functioning of a building before it’s built, then you can know that it’s going to perform in a reliable way,” he said, adding that’s not only the structure itself, but also how sound or light behaves. “On the other hand, one could argue that rarely are engineers and architects ever willing to build things that they think are totally outside the bounds of what they’ve done before and what has worked historically. People aren’t putting up structures that… were totally inconceivable in the past.”
HATCHING COMPUTERISED FARMING
Farmers these days have cows connected by the Internet of Things and driverless tractors, but digitising animal husbandry began in the 1960s in Hebden Bridge, at Thornber Farms. The firm was breeding hens and studying their output to produce better, larger and more consistent eggs. The data was tracked via punch-card records, and in 1962 the company bought an Elliot 803, a British-made machine also used by the GPO at the Dollis Hill Research Station and Goonhilly Downs to calculate satellite movements.