Some of the Drawings and Pictures shared by Big Yellow
Visualisations of the Proposal – Public Art
Visualisation of the Proposal – Hammersmith Road
Visualisation of the Proposal – Lyons Walk
Public Art Design Brief & Research
66 Hammersmith Road Read More »
THE 19TH LEO REUNION The National Museum of Computing, Bletchley Park, Thursday, 31ST October 2024
Narrative by Peter Byford
Thirty members of the LEO Computers Society, some with their wives, plus Simon Allen (Head of Development, Big Yellow Storage) and Anna Ryten (architect for the redevelopment project for 66 Hammersmith Road, formerly Cadby Hall) attended this Reunion event.
The event officially started at 11am, however many arrived a little earlier. Several came some distance, often by train; we had people coming from Hampshire, Kent and Dorset. Train delays meant that some arrived late. Tea, coffee and biscuits were available throughout the event. Peter brought his own collection of LEO and Lyons memorabilia of ashtrays, flowchart template etc. and this also included a folder containing all the information (including attendees) for the first reunion in 1978.
At around 11.30 Peter Byford welcomed the attendees to the 19th Reunion and explained that we were the first people to come to the refurbished TNMoC. Peter welcomed our two guests, Simon Allen and Anna Ryten whose redevelopment project for 66 Hammersmith Road includes references to Lyons and the LEO heritage. They shared many of the drawings and images used in the planning application with the members at the reunion. You can see some of these on this page
Peter then set out the programme for the day which included tours by Vince Bodsworth and Sheridan Williams, volunteer TNMoC guides and members of the Society after lunch.
Jacqui Garrad, Director of TNMoC welcomed us to the museum and said that she was keen to have better links with the Society. This was followed by Vince Bodsworth giving a demonstration of the Virtual LEO 1 display which is being introduced to TNMoC as part of the Society’s Museums Project. Eric Dickens then presented the CLEO Premium bond demonstration, which will also be part of the Museums project. Simon Allen and Anna Ryten showed members the documents and pictures describing their plans for the Hammersmith Road development which were displayed on a table.
We had expected ten raffle prizes, In the event Anna Ryten’s promised prize turned out to be very generous, 6 bottles of champagne. Jacqui Garrad was also generous with 2 bottles of wine and several other items. I would also like to thank Neville Lyons and Frank Land for their prizes. As in previous raffles, Nigella Lawson and Thomas Harding kindly provided signed copies of their books. We also had 3 LEO books donated by the Pinkerton family.
As a result, the majority of attendees were able to win a prize. Bernard Behr brought the Society’s credit card reader and this was used to good effect, although most people paid cash. We sold 35 tickets and made £175. I would also like to thank Mike Tyzack for producing the excellent name labels for the attendees.
After a nice lunch which catered for those with dietary problems, Vince and Sheridan took groups around TNMoC, this included EDSAC and briefly the LEO display which we are looking to improve. Simon and Anna particularly mentioned how they enjoyed the tour around TNMoC. The event finished soon after 4pm.
| ATTENDEES | ||||||
| Simon Allen | Bernard Behr | Derek Bensted | Sue Benstead | Vince Bodsworth | Patrick Blakes | |
| Tom Brooks | Vera Brooks | Bob Brown | Mike Buckley | Peter Byford | Margaret Byford | |
| Bob Crockett | John Daines | Michael Davy | Eric Dickens | Guy Fitzgerald | Bob Harris | |
| John Kappler | Frank Kelly | Val Lawson | Mike Lawson | Douglas Milsom | Chris Reynolds | |
| Anna Ryten | Judy Skillington | Anthony Thorpe | Rosalind Thorpe | Vince Tilley | Ben Tilley | |
| Mike Tyzack | Sheridan Williams |
Some rather noisy video is below.
2024 Reunion at TNMOC Read More »
LEO Matters Issue 16, November 2024 has been published and circulated to Members and others. It can be downloaded by following the download link on this page .
LEO Matters issue 16, November 2024 Read More »
A new/updated leaflet about LEO has been produced for use at gatherings and in emails to people who may have an interest. It is in a PDF document which can be printed out or attached to messages. It is two sides exactly and so ideally printed on a device that can handle two sided printing. (On single sided printers print one side then turn the paper over to print the second side)
It does have some colour in it for the logos but it looks OK in monochrome. Leaflet – September 2024 V1
A leaflet about LEO Read More »
LEO Matters Issue 15, June 2024 has been published and circulated to Members and others. It can be downloaded by following the download link on this page .
LEO Matters issue 15, June 2024 Read More »
Test links
leo-computers.org.uk/Videos
| Leo-computers.org.uk/Videos/GMT20230523-155915_Corby.mp4 |
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Andrew Herbert, is a distinguished Computer Science practitioner who hails from the Cambridge Tradition. Having held a very senior position in Microsoft Research, in retirement he is the leader of the project on display at TNMoC to construct a replica of the pioneering EDSAC I computer at the University of Cambridge which first went into service in 1949.
On 26 April 2024 Andre spoke to the LEO Computer Society on Zoom about the reconstruction project , now close to completion. He spoke of the challenges of reconstructing a machine for which there were very few surviving circuit diagrams – the EDSAC reconstruction team worked mostly from contemporary photographs and secondary sources and research into established circuits for “computing with waveforms” known to 1940s electronics engineers.
A recording is available here Zoom Recording
Copy of the slides used can be found here Slides
Rebuild of EDSAC at TNMoC: Presented by Andrew Herbert Read More »
Over time there have been a number of programmes on the BBC Radio which have talked about LEO. Neville Lyons put together material extracted from the BBC programmes together with relevant Slides to provide visual content and this was presented on 12 December 2023. A recording is available here Zoom Recording
To listen to the original BBC material without the slides you can follow the links below.
LEO the Electronic Office from BBC Radio 4 Computing Britain
December 23
Since 2018 the Cambridge-based Centre for Computing History (CCH) has been working in partnership with the LEO Computers Society on a lottery-funded project to provide a long-term, centralised home for the society’s historically important and internationally significant heritage relating to LEO (Lyons Electronic Office), the world’s first business computer, so that the collection is accessible to the public.
The lottery project ended formally in June this year, but the cooperation of the two organisations continues. The result to date is that the Cambridge centre now looks after many thousands of individual items – as well as their newly created digital equivalents – and the partners continue to promote the LEO story in various ways. Their most innovative approach is an award-winning digital ‘rebuild’ of the original LEO, available both in a display at CCH and, in a major step forward in opening up access from anywhere in the world, via tablet devices.
The virtual LEO is an historically accurate digital representation of the first LEO machine. Unlike a physical rebuild, it also points to the social context of post-war London and the Lyons company context within which LEO I was constructed.
And because the staff of J Lyons & Company and LEO Computers Limited were meticulous record keepers, recording not just decisions at every step of the journey, but the reasons for those decisions and their consequences, the museum has been able to cast the collection in a wider social context, bringing the human and social stories involved to the fore.
The virtual LEO app is already picking up industry awards, most recently last month when it achieved a ‘highly commended’ in the charities category of the British Computer Society’s UK IT awards, a glitzy affair held annually to reward achievements across the IT industry.
For further details on what the app is and how to download it, visit the LEO I website https://www.leo1.co.uk/
Virtual LEO I
In May this year, a PC-based version of the virtual LEO was installed at the Centre for Computing History and Dr Lisa McGerty, Chief Executive of the museum and the project’s lead commented, “Watching visitors of all kinds use it since then has been a real joy for me. And now, the virtual LEO has also been made available for access from the ubiquitous Apple iPad and the new app is going down a storm.”
Using either version of the virtual LEO, it is possible to ‘wander around’ the LEO room in Cadby Hall, the former Lyons’ HQ complex in Hammersmith, and view the racks of valves, hear all the peripherals and even look out of the window at the 1950s smog. Within the app, there are 35 interactive objects that can be ‘picked up’ and explored, and there are 44 documents, six film snippets and many photos from the archive, accompanied by over 40,000 words of explanatory text divided into six themes. It has been purposely designed in layers so that it is perfectly possible just to walk around the room and see and hear what it was like to operate the first LEO, or one can dig deeper into the wider story.
An Android version of the app is also currently in development and is planned for release shortly.
In a further comment, Hilary Caminer, the LEO Society’s secretary expressed her own amazement in saying: “I think it is a remarkable feat to put that enormous, epoch-making and room-sized early mainframe on to a palm-sized tablet. What would those early pioneers have thought and said?”
Other highlights of the collection
Over the course of the project, there were more than 50 separate deposits of LEO material made to the Cambridge museum by LEO Society members, some consisting of a single document or photograph, but the majority were of multiple documents – in some cases boxes of them – and there were some objects too, such as small pieces of various LEO machines including tape reels and logic boards.
These have been catalogued, digitised and in some cases transcribed, making more than 1,600 separate items available online to all, via the CCH website. These incorporate almost 13,000 scanned pages of documentation in total. On the CCH website these sit alongside the CCH version of the LEO Society’s Leopedia database, extending that resource in a wholly searchable and search engine optimised way. Whereas Leopedia lists references to secondary sources of information on LEO in books, journals and in the media, the archive catalogue lists and makes available the primary material.
The digitised LEO collection and the CCH version of Leopedia can be found athttps://www.computinghistory.org.uk/pages/52267/LEOPEDIA/..
Finding aids are also available and are being extended all the time so that the collection can be searched easily by people who know nothing about LEO – for example by subject – see https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/55802/explore-our-leo-computers-collection/.
The archive includes reports from visits Lyons staff made to Cambridge at the very beginning of the Lyons-Cambridge University partnership during the development of EDSAC; photographs of the construction of LEO I, particularly those that point to the experimental nature of the early machine; a memo from TR Thompson reporting on the first fully successful and complete run of the world’s first commercial computer job, Lyons Bakery Valuations, which was completed at 2:35pm on 30th November 1951; extremely rare BBC film footage of LEO I running the Lyons payroll as well as other snippets of film; over 60 oral history interviews and more than 200 written reminiscences collected during the project and over the years. And much more besides.
LEO Documentary Film
The lottery project funding also allowed for the creation of a short documentary of the LEO story. Produced by Boffin Media, the film won the Association for British Science Writers (ABSW) Video of the Year Award in July 2022.
The film is available on YouTube and can be found via the museum’s website (https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/66720/66720-LEO-The-story-of-the-world-s-first-business-computer/). It was produced to coincide with the 70th anniversary of LEO I’s first fully successful live program run in November 2021.
-ends –
A VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE OF THE WORLD’S FIRST BUSINESS COMPUTER Read More »
