 If you would ask almost anybody what was the first company in the world to develop a business application, it's unlikely you would have said the answer was Jay Lyons and Co, who were actually the biggest catering company in the world for a while, but known across this country, mostly for their chain of high street tea shops, of which there were 250 at its peak, a lot of them in London. I think there were four alone in Oxford Street, Ond yw i'r amser i Lleidydd yn y bach o'r cyfnod. A oedd, o'r erbyn ymddyddialau ffosh yng nghymru, y trogodero yn Llywodraeth, y hotel ymderwch, yn gweithio'r gwaith o'r gyfnod Gwladr Gwladr yn Ffoswyr, i'r teimlo i Olympia, ac mae'r rhai cyfnod o ymddydd iawn ymddydd iawn i gael gwlad ac ymddydd iawn i gael gwlad. Yn gyfnod o'r cyfnod ymddwch, mae'r stori yw'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod. yn mynd i fod yn y tyt. Mae gondol iawn i'r ffwrdd i gael gondol i'r holl i'r gwir ymarffiad yn fwyfyrdd yr ymddangas, popeth ddim yn ystod i gael i'r gwaith. Sementeynau! A dyna gweithi'r ffwrdd eich gwychol yn y ffordd o'r ffilm cenderwyaith, maen nhw'n gweithio'n gwybod bod y mynd euchynig yn dd pepper oedd o'r rhan fydd ymweld o'r ll secondary. A hen yn gweithio'n mewn unigwethaf, oedd y gwaith ar gyfer mathemaethau. Felly, yw ddweud ychydig i'r bwrdd, i gweithio arall, a'r bwrdd i'r rhan. Yn gyfaint o'r gyfrannu, jaleins yn co, mae'n ddysgu'r ffordd i'r ffordd o'r 19th sydd. Mae'n ddod o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r cyfrannu samanol. Mae'n ddod o'r cyfrannu, i ddod o'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. called Jay Lyons to put their name to it in case it went pear shaped and they didn't want any anything to sully the glorious name of salmon and guldstein which was known for its cigars and cigarettes and so they gave the name Lyons but in fact it was the salmon's and the guldstein's who continued to run the business and you might be interested to know that a new book has just come out called Legacy which is all about that family business which includes people like Dominic and Nigella Lawson are their descendants of the the salmon's I think it is and also George Mombio I read the other day I hadn't realised he was descended from that family as well. Okay Halifax Digital seems to be unhappy about something. Shall we just close Chrome? There we are. So it was a family business and this is a it's shop in Cannon Street must have been around the shortly after the turn of the 19th 20th century before they went up to build this huge empire and they went there it was a very vertically integrated company they had a philosophy of extreme control a quality control right across the company and that entailed essentially making everything themselves from the uniforms of the waitresses who were known as nippies and they had these very smart black uniforms with pearl buttons that were made in Paris to manufacturing all their own food so they had they had food manufacturing business mostly based in west London that had a Swiss roll bakery that made I'm very bad at remembering figures but miles and miles of Swiss roll every week came out of this automatic bakery and bread and they had their own tea plantations you get you get the picture they liked to control everything but running the tea shops was complicated most people would come in they would have nothing but a cup of tea and a bun very small transactions and you obviously had to keep your margins very look at your margins very very carefully to make sure that you stayed in business because you had too much unsold fresh goods at the end of the day you would be losing money if you price things wrongly you'd be losing money and so there was this massive back office function of girls mostly school leavers so they would have been 15 16 year olds sat at big brown speaker calculators punching in checking the the receipts from the shops against the bills that had been issued in the shops and there was a manager at time so we're now talking about this at 1930s there was a manager at the time called John Simmons he was one of the few people who was senior in the company who wasn't actually a family member and he recalled later looking at this room full of literally hundreds of clerks and saying what a thinking what a waste of intellectual energy it was because unlike it a factory production line you couldn't chat to your neighbour you had to be totally focused on what you were doing and yes it only yes it was supremely boring there was nothing interesting about adding up all these these numbers and he thought to himself wouldn't it be great if we could automate this but in the 1930s there was no way of doing that so it was a thought that he simply filed away so move on till so so World War II happened and one of the things that emerged at the end of World War II was the news across the Atlantic of something called the electronic brain and that was ENIAC and I've temporarily forgotten exactly what that stood for the last two words were automatic computer but it was a computer that was developed at Harvard and Princeton I think it was and essentially used for military calculations but whereas all the work that had gone in the UK with Colossus for code breaking at Bletchley Park was kept an absolute secret and not communicated at all to the general public ENIAC was immediately declassified after the war and so there were all these articles in the paper about the electronic brain and what it could do so two Lions managers who were going over there to just have a look at business practice in general asked if they could go and have a look at the computer and they did off they went to see what it could do and they were immediately thinking they were already thinking about the possibilities of using it for business across a wide range of functions and the people they saw at ENIAC said you need to go to Cambridge Cambridge UK because there a computer called edzac the electronic delay storage automatic calculator was being built by Morris Wilkes and his colleagues in the mathematical laboratory so off they go back to Cambridge go and see Wilkes and he says yes I'm getting on all right but all that's holding me up is is the money to get on and build this and so Lions the board of Lions agreed to fund the building of edzac on the in return for being allowed to build a copy of the computer and apply it to the business problems of the Lions company and all this was sealed with a handshake there was no contract written nothing at all but in in may um and this is what um john Simmons said about it here for the first time there is the possibility of a machine that will be able to cope at almost incredible speed with any variation of clerical procedure what effect such a machine could have on the semi repetitive work the office needs only the slightest effort of the imagination imagination absolutely key to what was going on here and on it was in may 1949 that the Cambridge people sent a telegram to Lions to say that they'd got edzac to run its first program which was a table of squares I believe and Leo actually had already started recruiting the staff who they would need to develop the Leo project I keep calling it Leo I should have said they didn't like the word computer a computer at the time meant usually a young woman with an adding machine so they called it the Lions electronic office which made Leo which and Leo you know it's a Lions name uh it fitted rather nicely with the name of Leon the Lions but I I really rather enjoy the fact that they had that slightly playful approach at a time when computers were all otherwise called things like PDP and sets of obscure initials so following the first successful edzac program uh John Pinkerton was the engineer hired to uh head the hardware side of things in addition to copying the edzac they had to develop their own input and output devices so what the edzac was mostly doing was mathematical work for researchers in Cambridge things like x-ray crystallography astrophysics things where you you put in a small amount of data you do a relatively complicated calculation and you get a small answer out what the Lions people needed to do was something completely different they needed to put in enormous amounts of data do a rather small calculation a simple calculation and get enormous amounts of output from it so all the input and output devices were developed by the the Lions engineers themselves using things that subsequently became very familiar like you know paper tape drives and printers and and so on and the first business programs were written for things like payroll and stock control so what what was what was uh edzac and therefore leo um so this is this is leo one these things that look like kitchen cabinets are filled with uh thermo thermionic valves um I've forgotten how many they were several thousand and they got very hot so the room had to be had to be kept cool uh and here were all the the consoles and so on that were used to control it and under the floor here was the memory so the electronic delay storage automatic calculator edzac was named because of the storage that it used uh which was mercury delay lines so these were tubes of mercury about that long about that kind of diameter in which you could cycle pulses of um of of electronic data very small amounts of data in each pulse but it would it would whiz round as electrons get to the end of the mercury go through that as ultrasound and then go around again so you could you could back up quite a lot of data uh in the in the mercury bit of the circuit before it it whiz round once again and then you could intervene in that circuit to um perform manipulations but the the total bank of mercury delay lines in leo one I think I'm right in saying could store two kilobits of information that's what we're talking about in terms of of of storage uh and they were able to do amazing things with it uh and this is a picture of john simons although it's not actually a picture of john simons I've seen the original of this um and it's actually a picture of somebody else standing there in a white coat john simons would never have worn a white coat he was he was a manager he was he would wear a suit um and somebody had cut out picture of john simons and stuck his head on that picture because they obviously wanted to have him standing next to the computer but it makes him look as if he's an engineer and he wasn't an engineer at all so the world's first routine routine time sensitive office application that I'm sure you if you know anything about computer history you will know that the competition to be the first to do anything is really fierce and so you have to be very precise about what you're claiming and what leo claims is the world's first routine time sensitive office application it was called bakery valuations and it was a program that essentially uh valued all the ingredients that went into the the line the operation of the lion's bakery and that was successfully run as a not as a test but in earnest on the 29th of febru 1951 and that that has been accepted as the world's first business application but this the really serious thing they wanted to get on to was payroll which was a bit more complicated to do and they had that running by 1954 and I should mention that all the all the time so the committee was running all this time and as well as doing all this work for lions during the during the day at night it was running mathematical programs for the ministry of defence it was calculating logistics programs for the railway system it was one of very very few working computers in the country at the time and so there was an enormous demand from other companies to come and use it um they were doing pay once they got payroll going they were doing payroll for ford as well uh because other people simply didn't have computers and so they came and came and used leo so it's it's function as a bureau service uh was important as well as the work it was doing for for lions um and so they need they knew they wanted a second one because they were getting all this bureau work and somebody at some point said well why why don't we make them to sell so lions the world's biggest catering organisation set up one of britain's first computer manufacturing companies as a subsidiary um which is again one of the most unlikely things uh you could expect to happen so leo computers limited uh was formed in 1954 but still as a subsidiary of lions and all the people who had been pioneering the development of these applications for lions went to work for the leo computers company um and so leo two was not very different from leo one it was better in various respects which i won't go into but it wasn't all that different um and they built 11 of them uh and and sold nine and and kept the other two themselves um and i'm just going to show you a little film um i apologize for the quality of the sound it's not very good um but this is a promotional film that leo themselves made uh about the leo computer and it's about a particular application that really appeals to me um called uh the called the tea shops distribution um and the film explained i don't think i need to tell you what these shops distribution did because the film explains but i want you to notice things like virtual online working on uh sorry um yes almost online working that was going on at this very early stage breakfast all these in a varying quantity each day are delivered to a precise timetable to the tea shops and the shopping needs to last sales but before over shopping soon becomes intolerably wasteful each manager has a standing order depending on the day of the week after lunch each day and she considers her stock weighs up local conditions and decides what variations up or down she will make to her order she speaks by telephone to head office where her variations are taken directly onto primes there is no written record what the girl hears she punches at the same time a short paper tape puts in last-minute management decisions such as that girl with changes in the weather that's his flexibility provided again the program is played first laying down the sequence for the multiplicity of calculations that leo will perform next to the standing orders of the telephone provisions tea shop my tea shop are fed in with the overriding variations on the paper tape immediately packing notes begin to print 10 shops at a time at the same time charges the tea shops and sales statistics are being recorded after further electronic processing these cards provide the statistics for the use of the management means of disciplines and built into the program leo will examine all statistics but only print the ones that require action managers are in this way being precise up to the minute information enabling decisions to be more closely related to trading conditions which were printed by leo 10 to a sheet are separated a package board and sent to the dispatch some totals of the different items have been worked out for bulk movement of the several roving days although the last provision learned until 3.30 by 4.30 the deal has printed for 150 tea shops and 40 000 items exactly what is wanted at each tea shop in the right order for the different roving days they are also in the right order for the commons calls so the goods at the front of the line can deliver last and the first call is just inside the doors not only a few examples of the wide range of work undertaken by leo milling each automatic office is the result of skilled investigation and design each appon similarly calls on the experience and know how are using automatic offices leo computers limited undertake all this in conjunction with the user's stuff leo is a machine that does routine critical work more quickly and more accurately than clubs the clubs are free for more rewarding and productive work as the use of leo extends a lot of interesting social comment you can make about that film i mean the the the gender division of labour is very obvious there was one woman called mary coombs who was one of the first women who was trained at the programmer but she remained an exception and there were certainly other countries i think it was elliott's who were notable in the number of women they employed um and it's interesting because women had been you know as i say but the first computers were nearly all women um but somehow when it came to actually developing computer technology women really had to fight to get into positions of seniority despite the fact that many of them had considerable attitude um for the work but lions i'm afraid wasn't exactly a pioneer in that respect although mary coombs who's still alive frequently gets wheeled out as an example of an early woman in computing but as i say she was exceptional and all those managers with their pipes was much more the picture of what was going on at the time so leo two leo three was the first transistorized leo machine so leo was that that's how successful was was the leo computer as a business it was very advanced for its time every model was advanced at the time it came out um the customers tended to love it largely because the um the the programmers and the systems developers uh at leo also worked as what they were they were actually given the title of consultants and so whenever a system was bought they would go and spend months with the customer which might be dunlop or ford a number of different different big companies bought them um and the consultants would spend time with the company rather like and digital was talking about earlier making sure uh that the the the system that they had and the software that they had there was no off the peg software the software that they had was completely tailored to the needs of that business um and in a way that that was part of their downfall um that for various reasons one was that quite often uh the companies these consultants went and worked with like them so much they hired them so they were constantly losing their top people uh to other businesses um the the other was that it it just took them out of the company for for too much time and meant that and the time they were spending doing that wasn't properly costed that was another thing um so managing uh the the whole costs of the process of producing these computers was something that leo wasn't doing um all that well nevertheless leo three um as I say I had eight times the storage capacity of the previous version ten times the speed uh and it introduced multi-programming so you could run more than one program at a time um but the tragically that the story came to an end um because it never they had never actually made money and the the promise that introducing this to take over the clerical work would actually save money on the on what was paid to the clerks uh didn't really pan out um the the they weren't able to the the company wasn't able to invest enough to expand production enough and this was the type where IBM had suddenly woken up IBM up till this point or up to the mid 50s had really been making most of its money out of holleryth punch card machines and that selling the uh the the cards the punch cards that holleryth punch card card machines used um they woke up to the possibilities of uh electronic computers for uses other than than defence and and mathematical use um towards the end of the 50s and started producing computers in very large quantities to an absolutely standard model there was none of this uh tailoring every computer to the needs of the customer there was a standard model which you either bought or you didn't uh and and lots of people did um and really given the level of investment leo computers couldn't compute with that compete with that um 1963 there was what was billed as a a merger with English Electric but it was much more of a takeover uh 1964 Lyon sold all the rest of their leo shares uh and the company then became called English Electric Leo Marconi um the the Lyons people weren't told about this um the the sorry I mean the Leo people were not told about this until after it was a done deal they felt horribly betrayed they found themselves second in command to English Electric people at every level in the new company it was a bitter bitter disappointment to them all uh but all the Lyons people could think about was that they'd got away without actually losing any money in the end um because at that time Lyons itself was beginning to be less successful and again you'll get all the detail of that there's a little bit of that in my book um which is called a computer call leo this is why I know about this stuff I wrote a little book about it um but the money it was partly the problem of being a family company you throughout for a century or so in order to be on the board of Lyons you had to be a member of the salmon or the black scene family and you can't always guarantee that the next generation is going to be as bright as the one that's come before um and they weren't and they started making some horribly bad business decisions and so the manufacture that the catering business wasn't doing as well either um and uh by 1968 none of the british computer companies were doing all that well they were forced by Tony Bennett's ministry of technology to merge into a single company which became icl which eventually got bought by Fujitsu um and in 1981 that was the year that last lyons tee shop closed and also that the last lyon leo computer was retired and that that's quite a recent date really i mean that's within living memory for most of us um and that that was one there were a number of leo threes that were bought by the post office to run their post office billing premium bonds there were national computing centres around the country run by the post office and they had leos and they liked them and they actually forced english electric leo marconi to to make some more leos even after they were supposedly not on offer anymore because they as one of the managers said to me we like them they just worked they did what we wanted them to do um you can find out more about leo uh in various places um the leo computer society works extremely hard to promote the history of leo and we have a representative here uh in the form of john dale who will be happy to give you leaflets about leo later or and answer any more technical questions you may have and the centre for computing history at Cambridge um together with the leo computer society recently won a big lottery grant to enable them to collect and document and put on public display um aspects of of leo memorabilia um no that sounds like the wrong word bits of leos bits of leo documentation uh so to preserve the the heritage of leo um that's my book and uh i'm told that the bookcase in hefton bridge has got two or three copies in so if you're interested you can get them there um and there's this other new book legacy that i wanted to mention as well but i think although i've been talking about something that might seem like ancient history i think if we if we think about it there are lots of lessons here uh for what could have been done and wasn't or what could have been done better and one thing which i didn't mention in passing but i'll mention now is the role of government one of the reasons ibm did as well as it did was because they had massive amounts of department of defense money uh which obviously benefited their defense applications but it also went into civil computing the british government was incredibly slow to invest in computing incredibly slow to see the possibilities the commercial possibilities of computing as were on the whole british companies it was a source of enormous frustration to the leo people who really were visionary and it wasn't that this wasn't a flash in the pan this computer business they had been right from the start visionary in the way they developed their manufacturing methods the way they've organised their management and this was just another example of how visionary they were but they unfortunately in terms of british businesses as a whole they were rather exceptional and the british businesses were very slow to see the opportunities of computing and i think the other message really is this business of how much attention you pay to the needs of the user which was absolutely fundamental to the leo philosophy and which i think got lost for quite a long time but i rather get the sense that it's coming back again that the idea that you actually try to find out what your customer wants to do with this technology before you issue them with some piece of kit um is something that is is being thought about a new um and certainly i get the feeling that here in hebden bridge the idea that communities can develop these ideas and and make uh systems and technologies work better as a result uh is something that i've certainly found very inspiring here today thank you very much i think that's really nice