A Computer Called LEO: Lyons teashops and the world鈥檚 first office computer by Georgina Ferry, Fourth Estate, 拢15.99, ISBN 1841151858 Reviewed by Wendy M. Grossman
BUY a computer from a tea shop? It鈥檚 startling to discover that the first computer to really run a business was developed by Lyons, purveyor of lunches, good tea and cakes in salubrious surroundings in English cities and towns. And yet, as Georgina Ferry makes plain, the fact that the computer named LEO was designed by people who had specific business needs they were trying to meet was what made it work. That, and the kind of brilliant, inspired computer designers that made Britain, for a time, the world leader in computing.
Like today鈥檚 businesses, Lyons faced the problem of managing many points of sale with wafer-thin margins. The computer it built helped to automate ordering, and produced the statistics the company鈥檚 managers needed to make rational decisions: exactly the kinds of things computer makers are still promising their machines can do. Lyons also set up a service bureau to sell LEO鈥檚 processing power to other businesses, and even sold whole systems to other large British businesses, including the Post Office and the airline BOAC.
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A Computer Called LEO is as much a history of early British computing as it is the story of Lyons and LEO. As always, early technical excellence 鈥� LEO had features and practical abilities that didn鈥檛 resurface in other machines for years 鈥� was not enough to guarantee success. Ferry pinpoints a number of reasons why Lyons did not ultimately succeed with LEO: the core tea-shop business began to fail; computing needed too big an investment; the LEO team spent time inventing pieces of technology, such as a programming language, that it could have sourced externally; and the company never committed enough people to its computing effort. Even worse, it kept losing key staff to its customers. In the end, the LEO team was competing with massive investments from American competitors such as IBM, which were aided by their government in a way that British computer companies were not.
It鈥檚 a good story, well told, with lots of social context and the right amount of technical and personal detail. It should sober up anyone who still believes the IT industry鈥檚 hype. With all its technical excellence and all its business-oriented design, LEO was unable to save Lyons from its eventual decay and disappearance. The social conditions in which Lyons rose to prominence 鈥� the feminisation and urbanisation of the workforce and a need for a place where 鈥渄ecent people鈥� could have lunch 鈥� eventually spawned far too many competitors.