Joe Crouch – Died 2018.Joe Crouch joined LEO as a trainee programmer and quickly rose to Senior Programmer/Consultant Status, working at Hartree House. When Ilford Limited acquired a LEO II Joe headed the LEO team helping to establish the computer’s systems. Subsequently he joined Leo Fantl in South Africa as head of the Programming group. (noted by Norman Witkin)
Leo Fantl writes “A key area (in our operations) … was production, which covered our operating, data preparation, and local mine data capture. Joe Crouch took the lad here. ….In many ways Joe was another Derek Hemy, incredibly quick to grasp a new point, clear thinking, and a good writer. His direction of the preparation and subsequent management of operations was outstanding. I had chosen Joe to succeed me but this turned out to be not to his liking. Later he did much difficult design work for the larger group, notably Sage Life, the group’s insurance company” Joe married a local Afrikans girl.
John Godwin writes; “I remember them (Bob Day and Joe Crouch) as being among the pioneers of computers in South Africa. In the nineteen sixties LEO III/2 at the Johannesburg bureau was the first commercial multi-processing machine in the country.
Along with Leo Fantl and their colleagues they changed the way the Mines and other large companies ran their businesses. Today everyone is a computer expert, but then they really were. I am glad I knew them, true 1930 trail blazers.”