Douglas Hartree and LEO (from Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hartree)
Hartree’s fourth and final major contribution to British computing started in early
1947 when the catering firm of J. Lyons & Co. in London heard of the ENIAC and sent a
small team in the summer of that year to study what was happening in the USA, because
they felt that these new computers might be of assistance in the huge amount of
administrative and accounting work which the firm had to do. The team met with Col.
Herman Goldstine at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton who wrote to Hartree
telling him of their search. As soon as he received this letter, Hartree wrote and invited
representatives of Lyons to come to Cambridge for a meeting with him and Wilkes. This
led to the development of a commercial version of EDSAC developed by Lyons, called
LEO, the first computer used for commercial business applications. After Hartree’s death,
the headquarters of LEO Computers was renamed Hartree House. This illustrates the
extent to which Lyons felt that Hartree had contributed to their new venture.
Hartree’s last famous contribution to computing was an estimate in 1950 of the
potential demand for computers, which was much lower than turned out to be the case:
“We have a computer here in Cambridge, one in Manchester and one at the [NPL]. I
suppose there ought to be one in Scotland, but that’s about all.” Such underestimates of
the number of computers that would be required were common at the time!
