The ice cream tasted like an emulsion of finely ground plaster, but the tea and cakes were fine. The decor featured mirrored walls and colourful lithographs by Edward Ardizzone. And then there were the waitresses: black dress, white collar, white pinafore and smart but silly cap. 鈥淣ippies鈥�, they were called: a patronising epithet that raised only a few eyebrows in the 1950s.
No reader with a memory of post-war England will fail to recall the chain of teashops run by J. Lyons and Co. But few of us sipping tea and nibbling slices of Swiss roll had the faintest idea that this temple of lower-middle-class refreshment concealed a technological revolution. Back at the company鈥檚 head office a small group of self-taught computer buffs were maintaining the uninterrupted flow of tea and cakes from depot to shop with the help of LEO: the world鈥檚 first business computer.
WHEN word spread through the business world that a British catering company was trying to use newfangled electronic technology to boost its efficiency, the response was sceptical. This was understandable. In today鈥檚 terms it would be like hearing that Pizza Hut had developed a new generation of microprocessor, or McDonald鈥檚 had invented the Internet.
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J. Lyons and Co was founded in 1887 to fill a gap in the catering market: feeding and watering the crowds at exhibitions and trade fairs. It was a great success. By the 1940s the company was not only a leader in its original enterprise, but was also making and selling all sorts of cakes, confectionery, coffee and tea, and running a chain of teashops and larger restaurants, the celebrated 鈥淐orner Houses鈥� that offered 鈥渓uxury catering for the little man鈥�. The Coventry Street branch in London, which opened in 1907, seated 4500 people keen to partake of a little luxury.
Lyons remained a paternalistic family firm: a conservative enterprise in a still-conservative business world. So where did this purveyor of toasted teacakes find the inspiration to pioneer a new technology?
Frank Land, who joined Lyons in 1952 as a trainee and is now visiting professor of information management at the London School of Economics, traces the roots of the Lyons Electronic Office-LEO-back to the 1930s. Any business that relied on being able to make and distribute countless crumpets, sausage rolls and French fancies to scores of permanent tea shops and temporary exhibition sites had to be efficient. It also needed some defence against what might otherwise prove to be an all-engulfing tide of stock lists, invoices, purchase orders and other such bits of bumf.
Lyons鈥檚 response, in 1923, was to hire a star Cambridge maths graduate as its company statistician. The man chosen, John Simmons, went on to set up a systems research office-a mini think tank that was eventually to foment the Lyons revolution. But imaginative staff appointments weren鈥檛 the only reason for Lyons鈥檚 success in innovation. The company ran on a culture of self-sufficiency: everything that could be was made or operated in-house-from manufacturing new bread ovens to operating tea plantations.
By the 1940s, Simmons and his systems research people were already dreaming of a machine that could read documents. In 1947, eager to exploit anything the Americans might have to offer, staff members Raymond Thompson and Oliver Standingford paid a fact-finding visit to the US. Here they heard of what was then referred to as an 鈥渆lectronic brain鈥�. In particular they learned about ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer developed at the University of Pennsylvania to crunch numbers for the military. Neither Thompson nor Standingford was an engineer, but Thompson in particular-a strong personality and disinclined to be intimidated by mere novelty-reckoned that this technology could be adapted to the business needs of Lyons.
The next step was to make contact with someone in Britain who knew about electronic brains. This took them to Cambridge to see the University鈥檚 EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Computer) and its overseer Douglas Hartree. In an early omen of things to come, the Cambridge researchers pleaded shortage of cash, so Lyons stumped up a 拢3000 grant. In return the Cambridge academics agreed to help Lyons build its own computer, adapted for business purposes.
The deal succeeded. The work was carried out in the company鈥檚 Cadby Hall headquarters: not, as the name might suggest, a former stately home, but an undistinguished building on a main road in west London. The machine they conceived and constructed was dubbed the Lyons Electronic Office. LEO I, the first computer designed to handle routine office work, was born in 1951.
David Caminer, another trainee who had joined Lyons in 1936, became the company鈥檚 systems manager charged with putting the new machine to work. Although he knew nothing about electronics, he and the small group running LEO refused to be overawed by it. They aimed to treat LEO as just another bit of office machinery, albeit a temperamental one with its 9000 valves and countless soldered joints. Even with a rolling programme of valve testing and replacement-one person was employed full-time on this-breakdowns were frequent. And when the machine had to be switched off, it needed an elaborate run-up procedure to get going again.
Caminer denies that he or his colleagues were visionaries. Amazingly, in the early stages of the project there was little sense of the potential influence of these machines, or the extent to which business would soon rely on them. But when the significance of what they were doing began to dawn, LEO鈥檚 keepers saw themselves as the custodian of a new idea. This meant that LEO couldn鈥檛 be allowed to fail. If anything went wrong, they would blame themselves, not their temperamental baby. And they got away with it. LEO always got the jobs done on time.
As word spread of what Lyons was up to, scepticism gave way to interest, and other companies such as Ford Motors began to hire time on the machine to do their own payrolls and the like. Once a year, as soon as the Chancellor of the Exchequer had announced his budget, LEO calculated a new set of tax tables for the Inland Revenue. From being just a department of Lyons, the LEO people became a separate company. They developed the new and more powerful LEO II, and then Leo III, one of the first all-transistor machines. And they also went into manufacturing and selling equipment.
In 1963 the company merged with English Electric, which itself became part of International Computers Ltd. Graduates of that early LEO training school are now scattered throughout the computer industry.
The short but glorious era of the house of LEO came to an end in 1981 when the last machine-one of a batch sold to the Post Office-was retired. LEO I had begun its reign by smoothing the flow of lemonade and pastries. The last of the line, LEO III, finished by doing the same for letters and parcels. The innovative LEO dynasty, as improbable as it had been successful, was over.