LEO editor

Ray Smith, Reminiscences of a LEO III Operator and Intercode
Programmer
Ray started as a trainee operator on the LEO III/4 in Greenwich for the London Boroughs’
Joint Computer Committee (LBJCC) in 1966. He progressed to a senior operator before
joining the London Boroughs’ Management Services Unit (LBMSU) in 1968 as a trainee
Intercode programmer. The LBMSU provided the programmers for the LBJCC. After his
training course, he was posted to the North London satellite unit which looked after three,
later four, North London boroughs with LEO III/94. He was not very happy about being
posted to the sticks as he regarded it at the time. However, not long afterward the North
London boroughs severed their relationship and his unit became independent. This put
him into a fairly senior position overnight. Now he was happy. A couple of years later
this unit became the London On-Line Local Authorities, moved to Enfield and installed an
IBM machine. Ray was then sent on an IBM PL/1 course. In due course, he rose to the
Principal Programmer position. Around 1977 he moved to work for Lloyd’s of London
where he stayed until 1998 becoming the General Manager of the Systems Development
group and finally in charge of development, operations, networking and
telecommunications. He retired in 2002 after spending a few years as a consultant mainly
for JP Morgan.
My view is that for its time the LEO architecture was brilliant and Intercode was a very
significant step forward over its rather elegant (in my opinion) Machine code. It also
stood the test of time lasting into the late 70s.
As an operator, I found the machine itself a very rewarding challenge to get the best out of
it, but get the best out of it we did (well some of us). For instance: understanding how the
Master allocated valuable core storage. If the operator loaded programs in a non-optimum
way that would limit the number of programs that could be running concurrently at any

Eileen Smith Role in Lyons included filling out Lector Forms. I read your article in the
magazine with great interest having worked
for J Lyons and Strand Hotels. November 1962 I joined the company as a trainee
supervisor in the Corner Houses under the direction of Miss Clancy and Mrs Silverlock. It
was a 9 month programme followed by a posting to one of the units. I went to The Grill
and Cheese and The trolley Restaurants at the Tottenham Court
Branch. Miss Brett was the House Manager. As part of my training I had to learn how to
complete the Leo time sheets. I don’t remember too much other than we had to use a
particular strength of graphite pencil and only fill in the brackets[sausages[ very carefully.
If you went over the bracket then wrong payments were made.
I enjoyed my time with the company but moved on to manage a restaurant
having completed a 3 year full time programme on Hotel Management before
coming to London for work. I did a further 5 years with Strand Hotels before the takeover
by THF as a Personnel and Training Manager with the Albany Group.
I still have contacts with former Strand Hotel Colleagues and when the
Regent Palace closed its doors I attended the Grand Finale . We all came
away with a DVD of the history of the company which I think I still have
tucked away somewhere.
Hope this info. may be of some interest although I am not a computer boffin.
Tony Carrol Operator at Wills Tobacco
My involvement with LEO started when I was a schoolboy. I had taken my “O” levels and
was going into the 6th form but I wanted to mix Classics and Science and was told in no
uncertain terms that this was not possible. I could not just do Science as the only chemistry
exam I passed was by ignoring the H2O s etc and just concentrated on the maths. I thought
this was NOT chemistry. So I ended up doing Classics which did not suit me.
Through a friend of my mother’s I went for a job as a statistician but did not get it (thank
goodness) and then I heard that there ware vacancies for trainee computer operators in W.
D. & H. O. Wills. This sounded interesting and I was fortunate to be taken on and started
in September 1959 ( on £265 per annum ). I rapidly progressed up to Shift Leader and
stayed doing that role until 1969/70 the boss of the department (Bob Brett, with whom I
am still in touch today) wanted to move me to Systems and Programming. And so I moved
, thoroughly enjoying that time, and stayed in IT until I retired for the second time in
2003(?).
One interesting occurrence happened on 10th July 1968, but cannot be part of my talk on
LEO, was that our computer (a KDF9 by this time) was flooded to a depth of about two
feet. As luck would have it, the workload on another KDF9 had just been transferred onto
an IBM 360 (?) and this empty KDF9 was only about 7 or 8 miles from our site. We used
it for one month, burning out the motor on a brand new printer in that month, and then
returned to “our” KDF9 which had been successfully returned to life with, I believe, only
two new boards. I also remember that we only lost a few mag tapes.

Judy Smythson (nee Worrall), Leo career began in 1959 when I was interviewed by the
man I was to marry, John Smythson. Little did he realize what a momentous interview that
would turn out to be! I worked as a programmer at Hartree House under Helen Clark,
(later Helen Jackson) for about 4 years until I had my first baby. I spent the next 15 years
bringing up the children followed by a PGCE course to enable me to become a Maths
teacher. I taught at various local schools when I retired to look after John for the last 25
years.

Dag Spicer On Friday 18th February 2022 Dag Spicer, senior curator of the American
Computer Museum and American correspondent of the LEO Computers Society
presented the history of the Museum, its holdings and in particular its affection and
holdings of material related to LEO. Dag defined the Lyons/LEO story as a promontory
in the evolution of computer use – a very apt definition. The presentation was via Zoom
and finished with a question-and-answer session with many members of LCS and CCH
joining in.
A recording of Dag Spicer’s presentation on the Computer History Museum,
Mountain View, California on the Society Website can be viewed Here and
the Museum’s website on : https://computerhistory.org

David Stroll Joined LEO Computers Society in July 2019. Currently a PhD student at
Birkbeck College engaged in researching the history of Works Study and O&M and their
relationship to Systems Analysis, and with the aim of designing a productivity
measurement dashboard. His studies followed after a long career in management starting
as a Management Trainee with ICL in 1968, a stint as regional sales manager, followed by
management with DEC and acting as an independent consultant. For a fuller account of
his career see
https://www.dropbox.com/s/viw9d5pjf1f18i8/David%20Stroll%20Innovation%20Projects%201981-2019.docx?dl=0

▪ Sumner, J. (2015), See also in extract from the paper in Articles
section

History and Technology, an International Open Access Journal,
Volume 30, 2014, Issue 4, pages 309-333 | Published online: 24
Feb 2015.
https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:261886&datastreamId=POST-PEER-REVIEW-PUBLISHERS.PDF

In 1947, J. Lyons and Company, Britain’s leading catering firm, sent two
senior managers to the USA to investigate American systems of office
management. Their bald conclusion was that established practice could
teach them nothing: ‘We did not find any firm which has developed on
so broad a front as Lyons, most offices only having tackled a limited
number of office problems without having surveyed the whole field’.
Physical layouts – notably including that of the Pentagon – were poor,
and development plans conservative, tending blindly to ignore the
potential of rapid electronic processing. Far more exciting was the
extensive American work on digital computing, but this was still largely
uncommercialised.11 Learning that there were British efforts in the
same direction, the Lyons managers fostered a partnership with
researchers at the University of Cambridge to develop the Lyons
Electronic Office (LEO), which automated the bulk of the firm’s payroll,
stock control and valuation tasks across 1951–54, placing it at the
forefront of international developments in this field. Lyons then formed
a subsidiary to market LEO equipment to other businesses, stressing its
business context as a unique guarantee of user-focused design.
Ref
A similar story played out in parallel at Ferranti, the commercial
electrical and defence contracting group, which in 1948 sent a
representative, Dietrich Prinz, to the USA to assess the state of the art in
digital computing. Prinz’s American hosts, according to company legend,
wondered ‘why he had come there, since the most advanced work was
being done on Ferranti’s doorstep at Manchester University’, where the
cathode ray tube storage system had become the basis for a prototype
computer.

John Sutherland responding to John Aeberhard: I have just finished belatedly
reading your interesting article about the story of LEO and thought you might be
interested in a further development of the story. I started to work for ICL in Dalkeith in 1972
As I understand it, at some stage between then and 1975 when I left, some of my
colleagues were working on a project to put LEO onto the 2960 (I think) for the Post
Office. Apparently, the Post Office unions insisted on retaining their existing LEO system,
so my colleagues were microprogramming the machine, which was also capable of
running VME systems to run DME/LEO

Alison Taylor and Chris Tyson, I am a 77 year old graduate of Aberdeen University,
now living in Jersey. In the 1950’s we lived in Hastings and my parents would take us up
to London to a show, we often used to go to Lyons Corner House for a meal. So I always
loved Jo Lyons. I met my first husband, Christopher Ian Grigor Tyson, at university.
When I graduated in 1963, we came down to London to look for jobs. Chris had failed his
degree, but was delighted to be given a job by Leo Computers Ltd, while I joined English
Electric in their domestic appliance division to do market research. My brother was
working for ICL (the English Electric Computer Co, in Staffordshire). We had another
friend who was working for another computer company, but the name escapes me, and
another for IBM, so when we had parties everyone had to define their terms before they
could start talking about their jobs as each company used different words the the same
thing. Chris Tyson stayed with Leo Computers until his death in 1970, but the company
name changed half a dozen times. Leo was bought out by English Electric and became
“English Electric Leo Marconi”, then it joined with ICL, and was taken over finally by
ICT. As far as I can remember Chris Tyson worked in the same office in Bayswater(?)
despite the changes in company name. I think it was LEO III that Chris worked on. I have
no momentos of Chris’ time at Leo, but I do have a Pelican book “Electronic Computers”
by S.H. Hollingdale and G.C. Tootill first published in 1965. It mentions the beginnings of
the British computer industry, which confirms my memories of the companies above. I
would be very happy to send you this book if you do not have it already. Myself working
for English Electric, I remember using punch cards and paper tape to analyse the results of
my surveys. For many years afterwards we used paper tape to hang Christmas cards from
the picture rail as it was so much tougher than anything else. I hope this snippet of
information is of interest to you and long may the society prosper.

David Tebbs Date of Birth: October 1938, joined LEO 1964 left 1969 Memoir:
I joined the company earlier enough to qualify for the society, starting work at
Hartree House. However, I was assigned mainly onto a KDF 9 client project and then and
System 4 Sales. My only LEO computer work was self- study of the LEO coding manual
(to fill in 3 weeks awaiting my first programming course – which turned out to be KDF9)
and taking on, as area manager, responsibility for the Lyons’ account shortly after their
computer room fire. Even the latter was short lived as I was then promoted to set up and
run the new Real Time department.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/x1060y7bk8djvf7/David%20Tebbs%20memoir.doc?dl=0
For a listing of David’s current activities (October 2018) see
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/davidtebbs###

John Thompson , born 4th January, 1935, joined LEO with no knowledge of computers
But got some very good training and education at the training centre. I worked on the
LEO I II and III as maintenance engineer and later at Minerva Road building and
installing systems I do recall some funny things One year we selected the wrong cow as
the winner at the dairy show, and we did payroll for the RAF officers and once made an
error that made every officer donate half his pay to RAF Benevolent Society but the
problems were always fixed very quickly and considering the amount of work being done
it was good for the early time in that industry.
I installed a number of systems in the UK and we had very few delays in the scheduled
handover to the customer thanks to fast response to any calls for help
I was just one of a great team that worked hard and had FUN. Later I moved to Canada
and completed my career
there.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/wgeg807wthgqsa5/John%20Thompson%20memoir.doc?dl=0