Simon Lavington, who has died aged 85, was a computer scientist whose academic interests in computer systems hardware sparked his passion for investigating and recording the history of early British computers. For this he gained an international reputation, and in 2024 he was awarded an honorary fellowship of the National Museum of Computing in recognition of his “outstanding contributions towards the history and ongoing development of computing”.
His first book, A History of Manchester Computers, was published in 1975. He went on to write six more and had recently started work on another, on the pioneering work of female programmers.
Born in Chelsea, London, to Jane (nee Nicklen), a nurse, and Edgar Lavington, a business consultant and company director, Simon was educated at Haileybury college, Hertford, before taking a gap year in Quebec and then enrolling as an undergraduate in electrical engineering at the University of Manchester. It was there that he and I met in 1959. Later we undertook our final year project together, building a serial one-bit adder using some spare, highly specialised transistors from the Ferranti Atlas computer project.
Simon stayed at Manchester to study for an MSc and then a PhD, supervised by Frank Sumner, investigating automatic speech recognition using a speech converter attached to the Atlas computer. He was appointed to an assistant lectureship in computer science at Manchester in 1965, later becoming a lecturer and then senior lecturer. He and I became colleagues, working on different aspects of the MU5 project that succeeded the Atlas.
In 1986 Simon was appointed professor of computer science at the University of Essex, and remained in that post until his retirement in 2002. Living not far away in Sproughton, Suffolk, Simon and his wife, Rosalind, were great contributors to village life.
Simon was a keen sailor: from 1999 to 2012 he sailed regularly on the Stavros S Niarchos tall ship, taking responsibility for groups of young people on educational trips. He obtained UN and British high commission funding for three bi-communal Mediterranean voyages bringing Cypriot youngsters, Greek and Turkish, together.
In 1999 Simon joined the committee of the Computer Conservation Society and in 2004 became its digital archivist. He was very active in the work of the CCS, particularly in creating and managing its Our Computer Heritage project.
In 2019 Simon and I came together again to write proposals for two milestone plaques from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, recognising computer innovations at Manchester. These two milestones – one celebrating the Manchester University “Baby” Computer and its derivatives, the other the Atlas computer and the invention of virtual memory, were unveiled on 21 June 2022, the anniversary of the first program running on the Manchester “Baby” in 1948.
Simon is survived by Rosalind (nee Twyman), whom he met in 1963 when she was a history undergraduate at Manchester University and married in 1966; his children, Damian, Dominic, Hannah and Tamsin, eight grandchildren, a great-grandchild and his sisters, Sarah-Jane and Diana.
