leo the super computer

[peanut]

amazing what rubbish you watch on the kitchen tv whilst sat at the PC.
Did you know that the worlds first super computer called LEO was designed and constructed by Lyons Teahouse! well now you know.
It was as big as a small office block .
It was operated by a huge office of gals called comptometer operators who took orders from the tea houses by phone and operated typewriters that punched holes in cards. The cards were then placed in the computer and acted as instruction set or program.

I was a trainee systems analyst at Martins the newsagents head office at Woodford in the early 70's The computer was huge with lots of big tape wheels spinning on the walls like Man from Uncle .Kept in a air conditioned room it was so expensive it had to be run 24 hours a day .
Not many people know that

 

[accountantpete]

Thanks for the pc tips

 

[Wolf04]

Man from Uncle, I loved that when I was a kid. Saw it again on cable a while back.... pure cheese. Now where has my Man from Uncle badge gone? Number 11, Napoleon Solo I was my mate Ian was Illya.

 

[trsleigh]

Later versions of the LEO were still in service in the early 1980s. I was a computer engineer from 1977 at the Post Office billing centre at Charles House, Kensington, just down the road from the old Lyons HQ at Cadby Hall. They had 4 LEO 326s when I started there. They were shutdown for the weekend late on Fri evening and then on Sunday evening there was a special evening shift to power them up again. Most of our time seemed to spent keeping the mag tape heads in alignment.

 

[barq]

LEO = Lyons Electronic Office

Interesting story and not that well known. IIRC it ran the payroll and stock control. It is funny to think that Lyons could have ended up one of the big computer companies! But there are still situations today where companies develop something in house for their own needs and then end up selling it to outsiders. e.g. Amazon don't just sell books, they also have their elastic computing cloud and online storage.

 

[Speicher]

I was talking to some one once, yes, I do that sort of thing. . He was involved in the very early days of computers, but had been told, there would not be much demand for computers. He was told that only two would be needed, one for the Inland Revenue, and one something like Ministry of Defence.

When I first started work, there was one computer in the whole company. It was the size of a small bus, with large tapes on reels of about 2 foot across IIRC. All it did was process the invoices.

My cat is called Leo, and my forum name is German for computer memory.