The Man Who Invented the IT Department — While At A British Tea Company! — Passes Away
David Caminer worked at the Lyons tea company in Britain in the early 50’s and developed the first commercial computer, the LEO, to manage the company’s 200 tea shops. He was an organizational genius who, according to many experts, could have beat IBM to the punch had his company capitalized on his efforts.
“In today’s terms it would be like hearing that Pizza Hut had developed a new generation of microprocessor, or McDonald’s had invented the Internet.” — The New Scientist 2001
The first LEO is interred at the Science Museum in London.
From Caminer’s New York Times obituary:
…Mr. Caminer drew up a flow chart to show how the different job requirements related. The charts became the basis of the computer code. Mr. Caminer has been called the first corporate electronic systems analyst…”
“The finished LEO, which had less than 100,000th the power of a current PC, could calculate an employee’s pay in 1.5 seconds, a job that took an experienced clerk eight minutes. Its success led Lyons to set up a computer subsidiary that later developed two more generations of LEO, the last with transistors, rather than the noisy vacuum tubes used in the first two models.
LEOs were sold to the Ford Motor Company, tobacco companies, a steel maker, South Africa, Australia, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, among other buyers. When the British government chose the last LEO to handle its telephone billing system, Tony Benn, postmaster general, praised Lyons for “standing up to and beating on its own merits” the competition from overseas.
But the Lyons computer operation merged into a succession of companies, which chose to use American technology, not least for its universality. Many have compared LEO’s experience with that of the de Havilland Comet, which was the first commercial passenger jet in production but which lost out to Boeing jets…”
When LEO was finally shut off in January 9, 1965, the Daily Mail ran an obituary for LEO. Prince Phillip was a fan of the sound the LEO made while running.
Technorati Tags: computers, IT, J. Lyons & Co
