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
