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54841 F7 LEO Loading

 Home > LEO Computers > Lyons Electronic Office (LEO) Archive > CMLEO/DC - David Caminer Papers > Working Files > Analysis of LEO jobs > 54841 F7 LEO Loading
 

Report on LEO loading hours - showing time and data used by each job - split by job numbers L1 Payroll, L2 Teashops, L4 Tea blending, L5 Wholesale bakery invoicing, L6 Ice cream statistics, L8 Bakery valuations.

For example, an ice cream dealer can be processed in 0.25 seconds, and there were 35,000 dealers to be processed. The data was received daily and processed after the weekend. It took 2.5hrs to be calculated and 140 hours to be recorded.

There are two copies of the report, the second annotated by David Caminer.

Research comments: This paper sets out the time it took LEO I to process the Lyons jobs it ran regularly in 1954.

The document outlines which jobs are performed by LEO on which days of the week. L5 (bakery sales) is undertaken every day except Sunday and is the longest job at 17.5 hours per week for calculating and 605 hours for 'recording'. L1, the Lyons payroll job, is run for 20,000 Lyons employees, with another 2,600 people covered by the "Orchard House Payroll" job (Orchard House was Lyons' teashop admin office, one of the largest offices outside the Cadby Hall headquarters). LEO takes 4 seconds to calculate the payroll for each of the Orchard House staff members.

Given the length of time LEO takes to do the work - which is still considerably quicker than human clerks could manage - and the time critical nature of the work, David Caminer plans in precise detail LEO's workload based on the time the data is received for each part of each job and when the results are needed for the Lyons business to run efficiently.

It is interesting to note that for L4, the tea blending job, data is not received by the LEO team until close of play on Friday or even Saturday morning, but the results are needed by Lyons' Greenford factory by 10am on Monday so that blending work can start. For the main part of L5, the bakery invoicing job, LEO processes 3600 orders per day Monday-Friday and 1800 on a Saturday. For the Ice Cream Statistics job, L6, LEO calculates everything within a quarter of a second per ice cream dealer but the recording takes much longer so that 250 - out of Lyons' 35,000 - dealers per hour can be dealt with. The ice cream data is received daily, but Caminer notes that work cannot start until all data is received and sorted into order.

In the second half of the document, the first annotation is 'Not practical'! (LM)

Date : 22nd June 1954

Creator : David Caminer

Physical Description : 1 item (25 pages), paper; typescript with manuscript annotations

Provenance :
From David Caminer's papers.



Archive References : CMLEO/DC/WF/ANY/2 , DTC/6/7 , DCMLEO2017111001-025

This exhibit has a reference ID of CH54841. Please quote this reference ID in any communication with the Centre for Computing History.
 
Article: 54841 F7 LEO Loading

This document has been scanned and is available to view online.
Please note that copyright is retained by the original rights holder.
File Size: 3.02 MB






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