A chain of British tea-shops was once miles ahead of IBM and other computer companies, and started computerising its business in the early 1950s with LEO -- short for Lyons Electronic Office. Basically, Lyons helped finance Maurice Wilkes's development of an early computer at Cambridge University, EDSAC, in exchange for help in adapting it to work as a real business machine. That effort was run by David Caminer, who died in London on June 19, aged 92.
The Daily Telegraph's obituary says:
When the system went live at the beginning of 1954, 1,700 weekly-paid employees at the main Lyons bakery near Olympia received pay packets containing pay slips prepared by LEO. From then on the payroll job ran regularly in one form or another for as long as Lyons was in business, and the system that Caminer devised led the world for many years.
LEO Computers was set up in 1956 to sell systems to other companies. It became part of English Electric, and later, ICL, the Labour government's "computer champion". ICL was eventually taken over by Fujitsu. The New York Times's obituary says:
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.
The Liverpool Daily Post has also published an obit.
There's a very readable book, A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Tea Shops and the World's First Office Computer by Georgina Ferry.
