Ross Milbourne Memoir and Tribute to Lyons, LEO and its people.
I have lived and worked with computers in industry all of my life, and have now retired. It
has also been a lifelong hobby, as well as helping pay to bring up my family. The career I
followed, from COBOL Computer Programmer in the 1970s, to I.T. Director in large organisations
over the past 30 years, was founded by your father, David Caminer, and his colleagues at Lyons.
For that, I will always be grateful to him and the team, as well as deeply interested in what
people like David did in their lives, from which so much later sprang.
To make your mark in history, you normally have to be in the right place at the right time, with
the right equipment, education and ideas. However, you also have to be a very talented person in
your own right, or part of a talented team, to make the most of that opportunity and turn it into
a success. To make your mark in history, you normally have to be in the right place at the right
time, with the right equipment, education and ideas. However, you also have to be a very
talented person in your own right, or part of a talented team, to make the most of that
opportunity and turn it into a success.
I hold a Master’s Degree, with Distinction, in Computing – that was an absolute
pleasure to study for. In my retirement, I have had the opportunity to build a good vintage
computer collection, as well as a library of early publications about activity in the field. I
volunteer for museums like the CCH at Cambridge, and have restored some of their early
‘home’ computers, such as the Altair 8800s and IMSAI 8080, for public display and
demonstration. I understand that they have also carried out a good deal of work related to
LEO in the past few years.
For my part, I have gradually accumulated more material about LEO during this
period, including collecting a few of the ‘standard’ books on the subject, and I have loved
reading about it. As I have delved deeper, I have come across other articles and material to
add to my understanding and, finally, tripped across ‘LEOPEDIA’ on the Internet. What
an amazing resource!
I quickly recognised that ‘LEO Remembered – by the people who worked on the
world’s first business computers’ was a ‘must have’ that was missing from my collection
on the subject: hence my request to obtain a copy from you.
On a private note, I have a couple of letters in my collection from John Simmons to
Richard Sharpe, the editor of ‘Computing’ Magazine, back in 1979. These were contained
in Richard’s personal copy of: ‘LEO and the Managers’, published by John Simmons, that
came onto the open market recently.
They mention David Caminer, when he was living in Luxembourg, apparently.
‘Computing’ were clearly wanting to talk to David about his experiences for articles they
were writing at that time, given it was the ‘Silver Jubilee’ of LEO. John Simmons had
offered to get in touch with David for them, to gauge to what degree he might like to
participate.
Ten days later, came the reply, which John quotes as follows:
“Of course, pleased to give what help I can to the project you mention. Unhappily, most of
the earlier papers of LEO programming seem to have perished in one of those necessary
but sometimes destructive clearances of the filing areas. It wasn’t easy to know thirty
years ago that they should have been given the retention classification of ‘infinity’ as
historic documents!”. How prophetic those words sound now, another 40 years later.
Archived in Dropbox at
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ylqayspiuic8437/Ross%20Milbourne%20memoir.htm?
dl=0
