Film celebrates 70th birthday of world’s first business computer

Afilm has been released to mark the 70th anniversary of LEO (Lyons Electronic Office, pictured), the world’s first business computer.

It was made available on Youtube ( www.snipca. com/40287) on 30 November, 70 years to the day that LEO ran its first program.

The computer, which had 5,000 valves, was built for the J Lyons teashop company, and was first used to calculate how much ingredients in bread and cakes would cost, before carrying out more administrative functions like processing payslips.

It took up 2,500 square feet of floor space at Lyons’ headquarters at Cadby Hall in Hammersmith, London. Versions of LEO were used right up until 1981, when the last Lyons teashop closed.

The 26-minute film was made by the LEO Computers Society ( www.leo-computers. org.uk) and the Centre for Computing History (CCH, www.computinghistory.org. uk), with funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

It tells the story of how two Lyons senior managers travelled to the US in 1947 to look at new business methods developed during World War 2.

They came back convinced by the potential of computers and contacted scientists at

Cambridge University who were building the ‘Electronic delay storage automatic calculator’ (EDSAC). Lyons later adapted EDSAC’S design when building LEO.

Such pioneering work made Lyons “way ahead of the time”, according to Chris Monk from the CCH. He says in the film: “They were an ambitious company but they knew that they had an army of people doing the clerical administration, and therefore automation was the answer”.