Tony Morgan, June 1937- April 4th 2020. Tony Morgan, who has died aged 83 after contracting Covid-19, was one of the heroes of the early days of computers. As a computer engineer from the late 1950s, he was responsible for the installation of the pioneering Leo computers worldwide, including for the GPO (now BT) for telephone billing. After a 38-year career he remained an active member of the Leo Heritage Project, using his unrivalled knowledge to identify the company’s artefacts. Tony took early retirement in 1995 but continued to work with the Heritage Project in the rescue and identification of computer artefacts, and advised on two books, User Driven Innovation (1996), edited by David Caminer and Leo, The First Business Computer (1994), by Peter Bird.As well as a demanding job, Tony was very sociable, and lived a full life with a wide range of activities. He played rugby for Lyons/Centaurs until he was 42 and continued as treasurer and club secretary for a further 25 years. His passion was Formula One and he detailed records of all races for over 50 years. Keen on jazz, he attended dance weekends until arthritis stopped it.
BelatedObituary for Godfrey (Geoff) Parry died 9th April 2010, first secretary of the LEO Computers Society
by Peter Byford, chair, LEO Computers Society charity and Alan Thomson (ICL editor pensioners website)- first published in 2010 but in a limited form.
Geoff died 9th April 2010, aged 70 years. He had been suffering from Parkinson’s for some years.
Geoff helped organise the 1st LEO Reunion on 23rd November 1978 assisting Roy Farrant. It was at the 2nd LEO Reunion on Friday, 30th October 1981 that Roy passed responsibility for organising the next one to me, stating that Geoff, Dick Warren and Frank Kelly would help me. So the first LEO Reunion committee was formed. Geoff was involved with organising Reunions and was the secretary of the Society’s committee from 1977 until 2000. He continued on the committee during 2000 but his illness meant that he couldn’t continue, although minutes of committee meetings in 2001, do record apologies for absence from Geoff. References to him do not appear in minutes after 2001.
I personal feel guilty that we did not give any form of presentation to Geoff for his 23 years of service nor really made any contact with him after 2002. Part of the reason was that he had a “lodger” in his house who refused to pass on messages to him, nevertheless we should have arranged to see him.
As mentioned above, Geoff was the Society’s first secretary and as he still worked for ICL he arranged contacts with LEO people who also worked for the Company, Without Geoff I am not sure that the Society would have successfully taken off in the way it did.
Geoff was well liked within LEO and ICL although he was never one to push himself forward. He was a singer, he was Welsh so maybe in the genes. He sang every year in the Big Sing at the Royal Albert Hall, until Parkinson’s prevented him from going.
His LEO and ICL career details were provided by Alan Thomson. He joined LEO Computers in October 1961 as a LEO lll/l operator. Later he also worked on LEO lll/4(Met. Boroughs machine) and on GPO LEO llls at Hartree, John Humphries House and Charles House up to 1969. From 1969 to 1972 he worked in Sales Support for ICL LON24. During the period 1972 to 1975 he was in Planning support at LON24 & LON23. 1975 to 1992 saw him become a financial accountant covering LON24, LON14, WSR02, SLH01 including the Windsor cash office from 1984 to 1988. For the period 1988 to 1998 he managed purchase ledger covering WSR02, MDN06, SLH09 and REA23. Geoff retired from ICL in 1998.
Robert E Peel– Died 2015. He was an intrinsic part of the Master Routine team with such luminaries as Adrian Rymell, Colin Tully, Nigel Dolby, Sheila Milne and I’m sure a few others whose names I have forgotten. The Intercode Translator team interacted closely with the Master programmers and I remember Bob as a thoroughly pleasant and competent member of that illustrious team. I think he worked on the Allocator/Loader routine which had to take the translator output and do something sensible with it. I remember nothing but the great professional relationship we had with him.
She was a pioneer with the service bureau of LEO at Hartree House, and she was the last person to go to Cadby Hall to do a small program amendment on Leo 1 just before it was scrapped.
John Pinkerton – 1919-1997 After doing research into radar systems and receiving a PhD at Cambridge recommended by Maurice Wilkes to Lyons as the Engineer to design and develop. He joined Lyons in January 1949 and started to build the small team of engineers which succeeded in building LEO I as a machine based on the EDSAC design but significantly modified for business data processing. In 1959 he was appointed a Director of LEO Computersx Limited, but resigned on the merger creating EELM. On the further creation of ICL he took charge of research into the product lines being developed by EELM. Subsequently he took a leading role in the development of International Standards and represented the UK in bodies such as the European Union’s ESPRIT project. He also became Chairman of the editorial Board of the ICL Technical Journal. As a tribute to his outstanding qualities the IET inaugurated an annual Pinkerton Lecture and the WCIT set up an annual Pinkerton Award to the years leading apprentice. A short biographical sketch can be found on page 208 of Peter Bird’s LEO: the World’s First Business Computer. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (ODNB), published an obituary September 2004 both in print and online written by Martin Campbell-Kelly.
In the 1960’s Elwyn was a pioneer in the use of computers in education and was the recipient of the HO Wills LEO computer after it was decommissioned and donated to Linwood Secondary school in Leicestershire. He then proceeded to repurpose the machine as the first computer assisted learning machine in the UK in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. As part of that he founded an early Computer Science class at that school. Elwyn went on to apply the lessons learned on that system and applied them to micro computer applications in the 1980’s as personal computing developed. He published extensively on the topic until his retirement. In later years he donated a number of artefacts to the LEO association including a mercury delay line storage unit, which is in the collection of LEO parts at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley ParK.
He is survived by his son, David, his daughter Emma and his three grandchildren, Bronwyn, Alice and Isabel.
Clive Richards, CBE, Financial and technology entrepreneur, philanthropist born 1st September 1937, died 16th April 2021 Twenty years before the Big Bang in the City of London in 1986, there was a small but important bang at the City offices of Wedd Durlacher Mordaunt & Co.
“In 1966 the stock-jobbing company exemplified the traditional image of the gentleman stockbroker who did most of his business over a long lunch. But Clive Richards, the managing partner, signalled the electronic revolution that was to come by buying a LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) III, the first computer in the City of London for £140,000 (£2.7 million in today’s money). Richards continued to invest heavily in information technology in the Seventies after he moved on to Rothschild Investment Trust, financing the development of the Datasolve Computer Bureau, a mainframe computer that was hired out by companies.
Anthony Salmon– 1916-2000 A member of the ruling Salmon and Gluckstein family, founders of J. Lyons & Co, was assigned Managing Director of LEO Computers Limited on its foundation in 1954 and became a main board Director of the parent company in 1955. He played an active role in promoting LEO sales using his extensive business contacts. Ceased active involvement after merger of LEO with English Electric in 1963, though nominally Vice-Chair of merged company. A short biographical sketch can be found on page 208 of Peter Bird’s LEO: the World’s First Business Computer. http://www.kzwp.com/lyons.pensioners/obituary2S.htm(page 1)
Ann Sayce (nee Tunbridge). She worked at Charles House (GPO) on LEO 326 between 1964 -67 -note after this she worked at Westminster Bank and CEGB-Victoria, writing IBM as she says, “rubbish”. Finally teaching computer studies at schools and adult education courses.
Ray Shaw, the last remaining link with the original design team that built the world’s first business computer, LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) has died aged 98.
Recruited into J Lyons & Co in 1949 for his expertise in radar and radio telecommunications by the LEO hardware team leader, Dr John Pinkerton, he was involved initially with the development of special test equipment and testing schedules for basic units within LEO, but later worked on the design of many of the 90 circuits that went into the early LEO machines.
He went on to do design work on the LEO II development that enabled the system to operate four times faster by interleaving the pulses from the mercury delay line storage without major changes to the processor.
Shaw left Lyons in 1956 to work down under with, briefly, Amalgamated Wireless of Australia on component standardisation and specification, and then joined the University of Sydney Physics Department at The Adolf Basser Computing Laboratory to work on magnetic tape backing storage for the university’s computer, pioneering the use of error-correcting code techniques to minimise the loss of information due to magnetic tape flaws.
Returning to England in 1960 he joined English Electric Computers in Kidsgrove, Staffordshire, to work on the design of the KDF9 computer and then, by a strange twist of fate, found himself back with Pinkerton’s research group and LEO after English Electric’s takeover of the Lyons computer business in 1963.
Work on standards
His later work with LEO involved working on a number of high-profile projects involving advanced data transmission techniques, including research into packet-switching techniques and data transmission standards. The European Computer Manufacturers’ Association (ECMA) had a series of Technical Committees (TC’s) and Shaw was vice chairman of TC9 that was looking at data transmission and error correction techniques that would in time become part of the multi-layer model that supports the internet.
Raymond Denby Shaw was born in Ilford, Essex, the son of Eliza Shaw, nee Pember, and Frederick Alfred Shaw. He left school at 16 with little in the way of qualifications apart from a facility for mathematics.
He joined Jacob White & Co, a privately owned electrical and mechanical engineering workshop. Then, in 1940, he went on to work on the testing of thermionic radio valves with Standard Telephones & Cable Company in Sidcup, Kent. His main ambition at the time was to become involved in radio research, which led to a move to the Electro Physical Laboratories in Hendon, London, that were engaged in R&D work relating to photovoltaic detecting devices and systems. And thence to Vacuum Science Products at Norwood Junction, a company concerned with the development and manufacture of silver-caesium photoelectric devices.
In 1943, Shaw volunteered to serve in the Royal Air Force and was trained as a radar mechanic, becoming involved with airborne radar equipment and navigational aids and air-to-ground cathode ray tube displays both in the UK and in the Far East theatres of war. Demobilised with the rank of sergeant in 1947, he returned to his pre-service employers continuing work on photovoltaic photoelectric devices and studies in radio and telecommunication engineering.
Following the merger that created ICL in 1968 and through to 1980, when he retired from ICL, he was involved in the formulation of mainframe computing system requirements for future products. He was also prominent as the leader of an advanced team of trouble-shooters.
Founding member of BCS
A founding member of the British Computer Society, Ray Shaw’s many interests were reflected in a wide range of other memberships, including the Chartered Institute of British Management, the Defence Electronics History Society, and the British Society for the History of Mathematics.
He was married twice, but had no children. His first marriage, to Ann Twyford in 1952, ended in divorce in the 1970s. The second, to Muriel Fussel in 1982, ended with her death from cancer in 2005. His one sister, Eileen, pre-deceased him in 2015. He is survived by her children, Yvonne and Alan, and by five other nephews and nieces from Muriel’s side of the family.
Raymond Tempest Shaw, b. 17 April 1924, d. 27 November 2022
Ray Shaw (far left in front) with members of the early LEO build team, including its leader, Dr John Pinkerton (middle row, second from left with glasses)
An addendum from Dag Spicer
Thank you so much sending me this – I really appreciate the extra effort you make to include those of us who are a bit off-piste in terms of time zone!
What a wonderful presentation by John Daines. Please pass along with deep admiration my best wishes to him for a touching and informative talk.
I’ve downloaded the whole meeting and will be keeping it in my personal research archives – it’s a fine source of information on LEO, as are every LEO meetings.
The discussion about whether “LEO was cost effective” was interesting. My feeling on that is more relevant than whether it made sense economically was that Lyons would not have been able to grow at the rate it did without computers – they were facing a crisis of complexity that only computer methods could tackle. My $0.02. :_)
Thank you again for this amazing talk, Peter. I am honoured to be included.
With warmest regards,
Dag Spicer
Senior Curator
Computer History Museum Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd.
