Matt Taub Died December 2021 joined the Research Department of LEO in the summer of 1955 after working for about five years on the application of electronics in telephony. Left LEO in 1957. LEO 1 was already in operation, and LEO 2 under development in what had been a tea warehouse near Shepherds Bush. For the first few months I worked on the Input/Output system, which, I seem to remember, was called the Annexe. and fulfilled the same functions as the Channels in the later IBM 360 machines. But another part of the machine began to present problems, and I spent much of my two-year stay with the Company on the task of overcoming them. In both LEO 1 and LEO 2. the main memory consisted of mercury delay lines, using techniques originally developed for radar during World War 2. In LEO 1. the ultrasonic pulses circulating around the delay lines were of about 1 microsecond duration, but LEO 2 sought to be more ambitious, and reduced the pulse duration to 0.25 microseconds. This called for electronic circuits whose performance was close to the limits of what was then possible, and the design of these circuits was my main task. In the course of this work, the Research Department moved from Shepherds Bush to Minerva Road, and for the last few months of my time at LEO, I was Assistant Manager of the Research Department immediately under John Pinkerton. By the summer of 1957 LEO 2ﾒs storage problems had been overcome, and I felt that it was time to move on.
