An interview with David Caminer by Mike Hally in preparation for his book Electronic Brains

Transcript :

David Caminer, interviewed by Mike Hally. 

Transcribed and edited by Jon Hales, volunteer at CCH.

INT:  Say who you are, please.  I'm David Caminer. 

INT:  That looks fine. Just by a little bit of background and introduction, can you tell me about your early life and education and particularly university and political sympathies and so on?

DC: I went to a grammar school, Sloan School in Chelsea.  And, um...  Had an interesting life there.   I didn't apply myself very assiduously to the later examinations because I was much more interested in politics in those days.  The world seems to be in an impossible state, with mass unemployment in the north, and very little hope of getting out of that cycle of deprivation.  And equally on the continent fascism was raising its head. And it seemed to be being treated with complacency our governments at home.   So I felt the need to throw myself much more into political life, rather than worrying about going to a university  I did go up to Cambridge for a scholarship.  I really did most of my revision on the train up.  Afterwards, I found that I was quite enamoured by the life in Hall at Pothouse [Peterhouse College?].  And I was sorry that I hadn't applied myself more diligently.

INT: And move on then to explain how you went to work and came to work at Lyons ...

DC: I came to work in Lyons because we had next door to us in West Kensington a gentleman with a winged collar who happened to be running the Lyons retail rounds. That is either a motor driven or a horse-driven vehicle that went round the streets  selling Lyons products. And he recommended me to John Simmons, who was running the Lyons offices and John Simmons in his wisdom took me on as a management trainee.

INT:  And this was ... when would it be?

DC: Oh about [19]36 or [19]37 or so. And that started a very long relationship because I stayed with Lyons and its successors to the end of my business career.

INT: What was the company like in those days   just before the war?

DC: Before the war, the company was an extremely efficient organisation

[INT:  - Yeah.]

DC: both in the productive side of the business and in its distribution and in its offices.  And in fact to a much greater extent than in most organisations the offices and the productive operations were very closely intertwined to. We did have a systems research office which carried out what was elsewhere known as the organisation and methods  function, which made sure that the management was given most advanced information that was feasible, out of the office operations.  The offices weren't merely bean counting and seeing how much money we had made  we were seeing why we had made it and why we hadn't made more. And that was the information that we were giving to the management, the directors and so on, so that they really could take action to improve the bottom line.  Knowing what the bottom line was not significant as compared with improving it and having the information to improve it.

INT: I'm just going to plug in the headphones for a minute because I'm a little nervous about some of the jet noises. [...] Right..., just continuing that theme of what the company was like. Can you tell me a bit about how they try to do everything themselves, the range of things they did.

DC: I wouldn't say that Lyons always tried  to do everything itself, but as soon as it found that it couldn't get what it wanted, it was pitch in and do it.  That was rather a better definition of their  attitudes.  There was an enormous...  enormous confidence in Lyons that really we could  do anything; so that we ran our own motor fleets,  we repaired them and we ran  our own  Laundry.  We had a state-of-the-art laboratory in which Mrs. Thatcher was a worker.  In that period before the war, the company took on the largest catering events ever known in this country; thousands being fed at the same time requiring an enormous  logistic effort of bringing together cutlery and serving staff and so forth. But [Lyons] always took it on and was always confident that it could do it, so that it was quite natural when it came to the question of having a computer as soon as we had satisfied ourselves that was a good idea and could work. We sat down to producing it ourselves and making it work. 

INT: Great, can we move on then to the period immediately after the war when this  started to be considered? 

DC: Well, immediately after the war, people had come back from the war. During the war, the company had been ticking over. With so many people away, it wasn't possible to make any great advances. But then, looking at the offices, we had to say to ourselves that there wasn't a great deal more that we could do given the materials at our disposal.  And so when we did hear about what was called the 'Electronic Brain' in the media, over in the States, there was some excitement that this might provide the way through to make fresh advances. We didn't particularly like being ... static.  And so, two of the senior members of our office organisation went out to the States  to see what was happening. They weren't, I might say, mainly looking at the computer. They were looking at what had happened in the United States, over almost ten years  we'd been cut off. First there was the war and the difficulty of getting any kind of transport. And then there was the currency shortage which made it almost impossible to finance somebody going on a trip to the States. So now, right, some money was available and people went out to look at everything that had occurred.  What was their office organisation like?  What office machines were they using?  What were their management structures?  How were they laying out their offices? What was the nature of their desks and chairs and so forth?  All of those things were in the remit of this party and as an addition they were permitted to go and have a look at the 'electronic brain' out in New England.  And they did, in fact, go to Philadelphia. They tried to see ENIAC, the 'Electronic Brain',  but unfortunately their visit was cancelled at the last moment.  Whatever the reason was given, it was probably because the ENIAC was down. It's not surprising that a machine with 9,000 valves did go down from time to time.  So they didn't actually see it. But, they were told that two Englishmen had made a close study of ENIAC And, well they were advised to talk to them when they got back.  In fact, the United States Army officer who was the liaison with ENIAC, Herman Goldstein did actually get in touch with the people in England and so by the time they got back there was an invitation waiting for them to go to see EDSAC which was being built at Cambridge following on the information that they had obtained from ENIAC in Philadelphia.

INT: Fine, well let's carry on the story from there.

DC: The people they saw were Douglas Hartree, the Professor and Dr. Wilkes, who was actually in charge of the mathematics laboratory

INT: What was his name?

DC: Dr Maurice Wilkes, FRS. Maurice, although a scientist of some considerable prowess always said, he wasn't trying to break new frontiers in science in building EDSAC. He really was wanting to make a machine that could serve the many uses of his mathematics laboratory.  There were Nobel Prize winners queuing up as if to speak, to have access to calculating  machinery. And, so he did take what materials were proven, and he followed the proposals of what became known as the Von Neumann architecture which enabled computers for the first time to have access to more than one program. Previously, ENIAC  had been wired up to do one thing. You could take the wiring out and take the wiring up to do something different, but that was a rather arduous business. The von Neumann architecture treated programs in exactly the same way as data and so you could store your programs in your memory in the same way you can store data in your memory, and access another program when you wanted without any loss of time. So that was a crucial element in EDSAC. And because he was so single-minded about getting something done by [for?] his users, Maurice Wilkes did succeed in being the designer of the first system in the world with a stored program capability.  And, that was a very great landmark and rather too little has been made of in this country. He really is a scientific hero. So, they went to see Maurice Wilkes [- You see,]  In their report, they really expressed themselves as rather bewildered at the very small resources that he had.  Maurice tends to contradict them and say, well, really, it wasn't as small as all that. 

INT: But they'd just seen the Americans. 

DC: They'd just seen the Americans with scores of people.  And here was Maurice with very few people, with very little by way of experienced engineers at that time. although they developed, most of them ..., he certainly was self-taught as an engineer; he learned his engineering, making his own wireless sets as a boy.  And ... they, on the second visit, led by the company's venerable Secretary George Booth, who was over 80 at that time, decided to offer Cambridge three thousand pounds,  which was a lot of money in those days, and the use of a technician for a year if Wilkes would make available the information with regard to EDSAC so that what was pertinent could be copied by Lyons. So at that time, we didn't have an electronic engineer in the place. There wasn't any such thing. We had an electrical department but that was involved in the electrical supplies to all the very heavy machinery, stores and so forth. Nothing very much to do with electronics. And so, we decided to advertise for an engineer and John Pinkerton was taken on. He was another Cambridge physicist. During the war he'd worked as a boffin in TRE [Telecommunications Research Establishment], the government research establishment working on air protection.  And, so John came on board.  The story is told that George Booth asked him -"do you think you can build this machine, young man?" and John said "Yes, I think I can". And then he went on after a pause, "but I don't think it would be very reliable".  And that was the worry that we had from the start.   But while a machine that was less reliable could be made to work quite satisfactorily for scientific work and for mathematical work when it didn't matter very much whether it was finished today or next week or the month after, given that it was saving scientists an enormous amount of labour and doing the work faster than it could be done anyway.  It was quite different with, [umm], business work where if the wheels are to be kept ticking you need to have it within a couple of hours of the time that it was supposed to be done. Otherwise, there would be no use.  And that was the great battle that John Pinkerton had and the rest of us had over the years to make our machine reliable enough, and recoverable enough, to get going again if everything else had collapsed, that was what we always had to have in mind.

INT: Was this just, in effect, a mathematical problem that you had a very large number of valves, and valves had a certain limited life?

DC: And ... they were unreliable, they could fail, so we went to enormous trouble to try out the valves before they were ever put in the machine, we aged them for quite a  long time so if there were any frailty it was exposed.  And then, when they were in the machine, we carried out test programs, exacting test programs, before ever they were started on a real job.  We carried out what we called marginal testing, that's to say, trying the whole circuits with the lower voltage and the higher voltage, to see whether they were susceptible to any strain.  We even went to the situation of actually vibrating the racks from time to time to see whether we could find anything.  But certainly the one thing we were never prepared to say was that we fail to deliver the goods because the computer has gone down.  That was something that would never, never have occurred to us to say.  What's funny it is trotted out very frequently now - that the computer is down.  We daren't say, after all, we were having to sell our computer inside our own company to start with and the and there were some quite exacting judges there.  And, the moment some of them would have heard "the computer was down", they would say well it's not reliable enough to put our work on then.  All the work that was put on Leo, as it became to be known, "Lyons Electronic Office"  all of it, the Lyons work, had to be approved by the customer before it was put on.  There was no question of some Godly figure saying "this has to go on", because we have a computer.   People can judge for themselves whether they thought it would be worthwhile and whether they could rely on it

INT: Thank you. Can we take up the story of building the first model based on the Cambridge one?

DC: We decided to go ahead once Cambridge had actually shown they could do a job.  That was the proviso laid down by the board of directors.  As soon as Cambridge can show them they can do a job, Right, we will try and build one of our own.  And duly, in 1949, a telephone call came through from Cambridge, from Wilkes.  They just, actually, had completed a job. I might say, looking at it from now, it is an extremely primitive job, But, we were waiting to be satisfied, rather than carrying out any very great inquiry.  We wanted to go ahead, and so we were satisfied by that rather meagre evidence.  And, the board of directors happened to be sitting at the time the call came through and they agreed right away, right, go ahead.  So, there we were, we had Pinkerton as an engineer already on board; we had managed to get him onto the office budget.  And, I was moved across from systems research, that I was managing at that time, to carry out the applications work. So that was our setup, a very, very nice simple setup.  It was John Pinkerton building the machine. And I was preparing work to run on it.  Between us, we had to get the job done. On the machine side, there were two jobs, two main jobs, to do, there were a number of jobs, two main jobs. One of them was to produce an engineered version of the EDSAC, one that was more reliable because it was being done post-hoc, so it could be considered, its frailties could be remedied.  But also there was a need to make provision for the fact that, in business work,  there's vastly more data and vastly more results than there is in scientific work.  In scientific work, the whole of emphasis is on the calculations themselves.  They carry out massive calculations on very little data and produce at the end of it very little results. One or two figures might be sufficient.  An example was the work ENIAC was doing. [Um...] as a contribution hopefully to the war effort, that was to carry out ballistic tables.  You started off with just some information as to what was the nature of the projectile and the explosive and you fed in something about the atmosphere and the wind.  And you then traced the trajectory of that projectile, recorded how high it reached at its top and calculated exactly where it landed at the end. And you went on, slightly altering all the parameters, until you had worked out a table for all the possible circumstances in which that projectile could be fired but the data was very small and could be moved on automatically by the machine itself. The results were very small. You only had, for all these calculations, all you wanted to know was how high it had reached  and how far it had gone.  Now, in clerical work, it was quite, quite different.  There were masses of data and masses of results.  And so, if the machine were to work economically, there had to be some way in which we could minimize the time taken on data and results.  And what we did was to produce something rather like a three-ring circus so that the data for one person, let us say, was being taken in at the same time as the calculations were being carried out for the person before and at the same time as results were being printed for the results before that. And equally, there were several lines of input coming in concurrently and several lines of output going out concurrently.  And this equipment all had to be put together. We ... it seemed to us at the start that we needed a magnetic medium for reading in the data. So we looked into the possibilities of magnetic tape which was in quite its infancy at the time, and there happened to be an organisation, a leading electrical engineering organization carrying out some telephone work at Cadby Hall at that time.  And, speaking to them, we found that they had some work in their back room going on the magnetic tape, and so we formed a partnership with them, that they would carry out the work on this ancillary equipment. Unfortunately, it wasn't just the medium that was new but also the valves they tried to use for the job were also completely new. And it all turned out to be something of a shambles. And so we were rather delayed in getting the whole system going. We felt that we really must get some application onto the machine, some useful application.  And I invented this job 'bakery valuations', which had its place in the overall management accounting system of the company, but which could be accommodated on not very much more than the EDSAC material.  And I must say, it wasn't regarded with vast enthusiasm inside Lyons, because our chief, John Simmons, was an extremely logical, austere man.  He said, what is the purpose of doing it if it could already be done on the machine which we know wouldn't be suitable for the mass of business work.  When I told him, yes, but we do need to get experience in actually getting live work running and done to time and so on.  He found that not very convincing, because he had the greatest confidence that I and my team could do what was needed.  So it was the reverse of what you might expect. I was saying that we really, really, we really must learn how to do the job and keep a job running.  And so he did reluctantly agree.  That is how the world's first business application came to be born. It was a job where data was less than usual and results were less than usual. There was quite a lot of calculating, so it worked extremely well. We had a few trial weeks and then in November 1951 the job went live and it went live ever afterwards for as long as there was that function there to be accounted for.

INT: What was the actual job of this [inaudible]?

DC: It wasn't desperately technical. It was a job that involved valuing all the goods that came out of the bakeries and went to the many different channels of sale.  Coming out of the dozen bakeries or so, the hundreds of lines, the goods were valued at  material cost, standard material cost, standard labour costs, standard [inaudible] on costs, that is electricity and so on, totalling to factory prime cost. And they went out to the channels of sale and each of them had their own realisation standard cost for each item, and so they had to be valued.  So these figures went back to the statistical office where all these standard costs were compared with the actual costs.  And so, directors and managers could be told what the deviations were, could be told whether the quantities were what had been anticipated, budgeted, whether the standard material costs were higher or lower than the actual material costs and so on. So it did mean that this job, it meant that managers could find where their profits were going without having to burrow in the profits and loss accounts of the company, which most people do to this day.  So, they were very well informed people. and this job contributed materially to it.

INT: How many people would be working on Leo at that point?

DC: Some time afterwards, it was about a dozen. That was engineers and applications people.

INT: So, a small team by today's standards. 

DC: [Laughs] It was [a] laughably small [number of people].  I'm simply amazed at the numbers of people who get involved on applications at the moment; and armies of consultants are brought in; people have their own staffs coordinating the consultants.  No, no, no, it's really quite laughable, the comparison. But they were all very, very good people and extremely dedicated people. And a very small team can achieve wonders if they are all working together or know what's going on in each other's minds and have confidence in their fellows to do their part while they get on with their part. So that made it possible.

INT: Can you tell me a bit about finding those people at that time when [inaudible] specialised courses?

DC: How did we find them? One of our key people in that period, Derek Hemi, was one of my people in systems research.  He came across with me and he'd already spent quite a of time coming and going to Cambridge to learn about programming. Which was absolutely in it's infancy there and he contributed quite a lot to the final formulation of their programming standards.  And together we were able to see what changes we need[ed] to make the programming techniques suitable for business work. There again there too there was a difference in what was needed.  That was Derek Hemy. He had a remarkably good brain. He picked up this programming stuff as though it was second nature. He was very interested in the classics and spent a lot of time researching the negative in Latin. He didn't go to university. I forget why he didn't go to a university. He was really first class material.  He was another one of the Lyons management trainees taken on by John Simmons, who really did have a knack of finding the right people.  Another one of that early period was John Grover who had come from the Air Force. And he turned down a long term commission there because he needed to go out into the ordinary world. He'd won the sword of honour as an Air Force cadet. He didn't have Derek Hemi's brilliance, but he was a remarkably good person to have there at the time. Because he was totally disciplined. Anybody that came up later had to work to his standards with no  shortcuts. Shortcuts we were almost eliminating. We never believed that shortcuts were a substitute for hard dedicated work. And nobody could have been better at inculcating that than John Grover.

Then there was Leo Fantl. He was a Czech refugee with an interest in in mathematics. When he came over here, he went to work as a, he was put to work as a farm labourer, but he carried on his mathematics studies as night work. And he found himself a job in the Lyons planning office [inaudible] in one of our 'trawls'...  We went through the company to find people and he was one of the earliest dug out. He was invaluable because he was put in charge of our work on payrolls, and many outside companies came to learn at his feet. Almost everybody, from outside, had learned something from Leo Fantl. And so, he was another quite splendid chap.

INT: - Can you just tell me a bit about those trawls and the special aptitude tests? These again would be things you would have to devise yourself... 

DC: Yes, indeed, that's the interesting thing; we really had to devise everything. We had to devise aptitude tests, we had to devise our training courses. Aptitude – we didn't try any psychological tests other than those which we applied merely by talking to people. One can see whether a chap has a spark of creativity, very quickly and one quickly can determine whether a person has physical and psychological resilience. Those were the things we were looking for. The aptitude tests were actually based on simple programming. But, we didn't, so to speak, give the people an examination paper and go away.  What we did was to set them some problems and a tutor figure would look over their shoulder and guide them and help them. One could see whether the people did react properly to guidance or whether they became stuck in their own holes. And, so there it was. And one of our triumphs was that so many of our people turned out to be very good people. 

The next set of people were Frank Land and Mary Blood. Frank Land was already working in Lyons on the management accounting somewhere and Mary,
her father was chief medical officer of the company, an extraordinarily formidable figure, frightening man. He frightened everybody, including directors, downwards so to speak. And so, he asked for her to be given the trial and so we took her on. She had a languages degree. And they both have said since what a frightening period their training period was. How hard they had to work. We always made it clear to anybody coming on to training they had to learn during the day and do lots and lots of work at night. So they would come in fresh the next day with what they'd learned and how they [inaudible]. Not many people fell by the wayside, I must say.

So there it was... [Umm] Frank Land and Mary were both graduates. Frank in Economics and Mary in languages. Umm...  Then we took on another fellow with an engineering degree from Cambridge. We looked on him as a long-term management prospect, Tony Barnes. And, that was our team complete for a little while.

INT: Shall we move on then to the sort of the first big project, the payroll?

DC: The payroll. Well after a time and managed to solve our input and output problems. That is to say, quietly, while our electrical engineering company was still trying to make their gadget work.  We quietly, by ourselves, got on with building something of our own. That was more technically simple, but it still did the job that we wanted. It was based on using punched cards and electronically sensed paper tape drives. [For] the importing and using a punched card printer with the [inaudible] mechanisms removed for printing the output. That was built by John Pinkerton himself without the aid of the outside world.

And so  that was going to be the mechanism for carrying our integrated applications which is really what we set out to do. It was really rather simple for us to produce the payroll application because, with our systems research background, we did know most of the company's systems quite intimately, not only knew how they were carried out, but also knew what purposes they served inside the company.   So, we took the systems that we knew. We added on to them anything conceivable that we could add on, like, for instance ... At the end of the system we rounded-off pay to half crowns so we didn't have to count lots of coins. The people had the money in pay packets in those days. This saved an awful lot of time. This was all done with the agreement of the workforce, of course.

One of our later customers, Stuart's and Lloyd's, rounded it off to... [phone rings, pause]    INT: "One of our latest customers ...".

DC: Stuart's and Lloyd's went further and rounded off to what was a very large sum at the time, ten shillings [equivalent of 50p] [...] with the agreement of their [work]force and that again saved more time. So all the way going along the line, one was trying to make savings of that sort and to provide listings and to save anybody having to touch the wretched thing again once it had come off the machine. And, that was an enormously totalised job.

And, when John Pinkerton went to the States, Oh, four years later, we found nothing nearly so advanced in the way in which the machine covered the whole scope from the clock card right out to the pay packet and all the ancillary calculations that were related to that. It truly was a model job. And, people like Fords and Kodak and Ever Ready and all sorts of people carried on having their payroll done using the Leo machine.

One of the [...] stipulations that had been in Simmons' mind when we took on payroll, was that there should always be a the machine standing there in reserve because it was quite clear that there must be some possibility of the machine going down and us not being able to recover from the problem. But, in fact, for one reason or another, we didn't build another machine for some time.

And, consequently, the Lyons payroll was limited 10,000 for a time. We quickly went up to that. What was amusing was that we also took on the Ford payroll and limited that to 10,000. And then we were taking on other payrolls ... Kodak, as I have said. The Kodak payroll, incidentally, was a lot more advanced than the one we saw out in Rochester in the States when we went to see them.

Yes,  so the total payroll at that time was going on to 20-odd thousand, and then the Lyons payroll went right out to its 20,000 itself. So there was a very, very large volume of payroll, all with this very precise finishing date going through the machine. And, because of all the care that we had taken and all the checks that we made all the accounting reconciliations inside the machine, we never failed to deliver anybody's payroll on time ever.

INT: That must have done a lot to convince the doubters in the organization or were there no doubters by that time?

DC: I don't think there were doubters ... there were ... Lyons was made up of a number of quite independent businesses. It's tea business, it's catering businesses ...

[Recording stopped momentarily, then re-started]

INT: Right. Yes you were saying that was made up a number of ...

DC: Lyons was made up of a number of quite separate businesses. People scarcely ever transferred from one business to another. Their loyalty was to their particular division. The tea business out at Greenford was quite different from the Corner Houses business in the centre of London. And so I still were quite a lot of bright people there. They rather felt that they knew how to do it for themselves and quite a long time later on conflicts did arise as a consequence. Simmons had a very centralized view of Lyons ... he, in his book 'Leo and the Managers' he has a chart which shows every bit of office work for every bit of every one of all the customers all being combined in one great Nexus. It's a marvellous thing ...it looks like the ... it looks like a three-dimensional flowchart of circuitry. But, really that wasn't the idea of the many of the Lyons managers, who felt that they didn't want to be part of one great assemblage. They wanted to do it for themselves. As after a time, equipment was coming along which would enable them to do it for themselves. And that was rather a weak spot of in Simmons' thinking. But, by that time Lyons and Leo had come quite a long way apart. And, had we been controlling it, we would have stopped them ... stopped him from doing that, you see. Because we always tried to avoid going to a bridge too far. You must always do what's within your capability and to have a good judgment of what's in your capability and not try to fly too near the Sun.

INT: Right, well, let's move on then to the tea shops operation. I think this is one that they probably one of the easiest for the audience to understand really.

DC: Yes. When the idea of a computer came along, one of the divisions of Lyons which was very much in our mind was tea shops. This was 200 or so tea shops spread right around the high streets of London, just a few in the provinces, and they, before the war, had been a great, great part of the urban scene. Office workers would go and have their lunches there. Women doing their shopping would stop for a cup of tea there. It was all nice and bright with white gold facias. With the 'nippies' [waitresses] attending to people's needs. And, it was very much part of the London scene; an institution rather than a company. During the war, the 'nippies' had to be withdrawn; women went on to war work, and it became self-service, which rather changed the character. But we still, when the computer came along, felt that we must find some application to lower the loads inside the tea shops. The application which struck us was one with regard to the replenishment of the tea shops every day. The in ... the method as it stood ... the manageresses ... there was a formidable manageress in every tea shop ... sat down every afternoon and worked out her order using a dozen or so order pads, pre-printed order pads. and these were couriered into Cadby Hall [Lyons Head Office]. And then the delivery notes made out and the valuations and all that sort of thing.

I looked at that. It was clear to me there was simply too much data for us to be able to record it and get it done in time for the computer to start on its work. And so, here was a case where we simply had to make a change if we were to succeed in using the computer. And I did have heaps of these, order forms, on my desk trying to get some pattern out of them. What it did emerge was a very simple pattern. Patterns generally are simple once you've got to the bottom of them. Then, that was that the manageresses were really using much the same order for one day of the week for the same day next week and next week and next week until the seasons changed. Then she was getting a different basis and altering from that. The manageresses weren't terribly conscious that they were doing it. But they were obviously looking up what they'd done before to see what they should do again. And so, what we worked out was that we would have the manageresses would set a standard, which could be checked by their own supervisors, and every day they would look at their standards for that day for that item and say whether they wanted it altered. And so, all that we had, wasn't the full data, but merely a comparatively limited number of alterations. So, we set up what we would call our call centre. And the call centre phoned them every afternoon and the manageress would simply read out her alterations. And the call centre there were young women with headpieces and card punches in front of them. And so, that was ... they put in the alterations. And that minimized the data entry requirements. 

But, perhaps more important, was that it vastly reduced the amount of time the manageresses had to spend at their desks. While they were at their desk they couldn't be supervising their staff, they couldn't be being cheerful to their customers and they couldn't be advancing trade, and so on. And so, one of the things that pleased us most was when we received these thanks from the manageresses, because we really had been troubled as to whether we were going to satisfy them. We knew how very competent they were. We knew how they had the ear of the of the board of the company too. They ... there really was a one-to-one relationship there. So when they were satisfied we were exceedingly happy.

What we tried to do in the tea shops job also was, not just to produce the delivery notes and carry out the valuations. For this feature, the tea shops. We tried to give the directors and management more information than they'd ever had before. Previously, they tend to go through reams of paper to have a look to see what had happened. The computer was perfectly capable of doing that, very much better than they could. And so, we did produce a number of statistics for management attention each ... each week for each tea shop. But we failed there. We had to admit failure. That what we were producing was information that we would have wanted if we'd been running the tea shops. But, we simply couldn't convince people that that was the way to proceed. And, instead, they still wanted printouts to go through it themselves. And, I fear that's what's happening today still; instead of using printouts, people ... top management are going through video screens looking for information that again the computer could give them selectively and much more incisively. 

INT: Can you just summarize the daily process from the point where the punch cards came in? Just to explain when it was calculated and through the nights the preparation of it.

DC: Well they came in the afternoon ... I should say, incidentally, that when we started on this not all the tea shops had telephones and a few cases the manageress for a time had to go out the local call box in order to receive her call. Yes, well what happened was that the cards having been punched were sorted into tea shop order and within tea shops into item order and then that could go in one channel of the machine, the 'standards' [recurring items] could go in another channel of the machine. Any alterations called for by senior management, such as what's happened if let's say a kitchen broken down and something else had to be substituted. Or, if a heat wave was forecast, when you would substitute salads for cooked dishes. So ,there would be three channels going in and out at the other end came the delivery notes for the tea shops. The delivery notes, incidentally, were thin strips of paper about ... about an inch wide and quite long. And they were put onto clipboards in the dispatchers so they could deal with one item at a time. The computer ... produced the delivery notes in exactly the right order, so that the last shop to be delivered had his goods put in the van first and the first shop to be delivered had its goods put in the van last. So, there was no burrowing about ... the tray was just ready there it was. All the time we were trying to do that kind of thing to make delivery easier as well as producing accounting results. 

INT: So, you're thinking about the whole operation not just the [inaudible] ....

DC: Yes yes yes yes, exactly, 

INT: Good. Right. Can you just mention, just more briefly really, a couple of the other applications to show the variety? I mean that one ... the couple that interested me ... the Chancellor's tax tables and the British rail freight distances. But the others as well that you wanted to mention.

DC: Yes the ... We were asked by the Inland Revenue to produce the tax tables for the year. Incidentally, there are more tax tables than you can imagine. There are quite a number of, quite apart from the ordinary citizens pay, merchant seamen's tables and various other tables. Anyway we ... it wasn't a terribly difficult job and we produced the results to time on in reproducible form. Let's say the tabulations could be straightforwardly photographed without having to go through the trouble of setting them up again. The first year was a shock. Note no changes were made and so all our work had been in vain. And in the second year changes were made and tax tables were used. The year after that the Inland ... you found they could have it done more cheaply by some government organization, subsidized government organization, so they went away. It was an example of the sheer short-sightedness that there was right through this period. We really had minimal government support. Those responsible for the government in those days ... government computing ... beat their breasts now this. There's no attempt to justify. They simply didn't realize that business computing would be vastly more important than, in volume, than scientific computing. At that time [was] scientific computing was the important thing. And so, if they could find some scientific computer with time to spare to do the tax tables, which could be done on the scientific computer, then they went there if they were saving a few 'Bob' [shillings, a unit of currency]. It's very sad.

Another very interesting job was the job to calculate the distance from every railway station in the country to every other station in the country. This was needed because legislation has been passed with regard to freight charges. And, it had been passed without discovering whether it was possible to do it, so to speak. And I remember a little man from St Pancras [a railway station in London] was coming around one day. He'd been charged with this job and really found it something quite impossible to do in the kind of time was needed, before the legislation took effect. And so, he thought it was a lovely, lovely puzzle. We found out how to do it. But it still took an enormous amount of time to do and so to do this job we did go on to seven days a week 24-hour working and produce their figures to time. it was able to take effect. It was an interesting problem. I won't burden you with the way we solved it. 

INT: So, I think I've really covered at the heart of what I'm particularly after ... the programs. So, can we move on to the later years. Skim over them a bit more but the you by now you were selling them to other companies and you were looking to the Leo two and three.

DC: Yes, yes. We weren't looking to a Leo - really we had built our Leo one and really wanted this this copy of it in order to carry out our work securely because really I suppose looking back it was something of a miracle we always managed to do the stuff to time not withstanding the vagaries of the of the system. But it was always intended there should be another machine. And so, when we set out to build this other machine we naturally ... human beings what they are ... started tinkering and we made a whole number of improvements. We, you know, we made the store a lot faster. We made some of this circuitry a lot ... a lot faster. We introduced one or two more instructions. And so, it was a really different machines emerged. Although one could little jiggery-pokery, one could make work one vice-versa on each of them. 

But, when we decided to build one, we thought well there are people who are making inquiries about it. Perhaps we'll produce two and we might as well produce three to make sure. That ... that's what it was. It was one two three. And really if producing machines and people are interested we might make them available to anybody suitable who comes along. Suitable was very much in our mind. We certainly didn't think of machines being handed out all and sundry. It was like ... like people who bred dogs. We wanted to go to a good home. And, the first people who came along were ... all the two of them ... were acquaintances of Simmons and his role for the Institution of Office Management. He was the leading guru at the times really. And one of them was the Imperial Tobacco Company and the other one was Stewart's and Lloyd's, the steel company in Corby ... later became part of United ... came part of the Steel Corporation. And, so we produced applications for both of them and trained their people and installed machines on their sites. I believe the Stewart's and Lloyd's site was almost the first custom-built computer building certainly in Europe; don't know about the United State. Most people had put their computers in an already built buildings but Stewart's Lloyd's went the whole hog. They had a remarkably fine Organization and Methods manager, Neil Pollock. And used their machine extremely successfully. They used it for a very, very complicated payroll with lots of cost centres. But they also used it for stressing pipe-work. They were a steel pipes manufacturer and these were often under very high pressure and they needed to be checked as to whether they could take those strains. On the other hand, not to be engineered to too strong, or too expensively. 

INT: But were you having problems with being seen as a catering company, still not ... enough [inaudible].

DC: Not with those two companies because ... because they knew Simmons and had the same confidence in Simmons that the board of directors of the Lyons did and .... But, the outside world, yes, my gracious. 

I remember going to Imperial Chemicals as it was in those days and talking to an old Organization and Methods acquaintance and really it was clear it was out of question for him to go to a tea shops company to do any technical work. Technical companies were the were the worst. But that was true even in even inside the government machine. There was a certain amount of doubt. It was felt that the support had to be given to the electronic engineering companies Ferranti and English Electric and a AEI, EMI so forth.  It has to be realized that more companies trying to build computers in Britain and all the rest of Europe and probably as many as in the United States. It ... it was ... the fragmentation here was unbelievable. The government found itself powerless to bring anything together. 

INT: But you went on and built the Leo three which is quite ... [inaudible]

DC: Then we built not the Leo three, the Leo twos. Every Leo two was different as it happens because we were making an addition for every ... every one of them. One of the most important Leo twos, incidentally, was one that went to Ford at [inaudible] [Aveley?] because it had to have approval from the United States and I was really quite something to get that approval that time. Yes, we learned an awful lot from this period and doing a great deal of scientific work as well as business work. Scientific work was valuable because many of the runs were very, very long and so we had to be very, very careful in our safeguards not to lose the calculations so fast we can't be able to start up again quickly without anything having been lost. So, day [Leo?] two contributes to our knowledge of ... of what a complete machine should be like. And we also learned, both by reading and then when our trip to the States in [19]58, the extent to which multi-layer boards and germanium crystals and silicon [inaudible] were coming along to replace all the ironmongery we'd used before. 

And so, here was really a complete machine it did everything that was wanted for the application side and also employed the most up-to-date technology. It was a wonderful machine and ...

INT: You sold a lot of them?

DC: We sold quite a lot of them. There was a limit to the number we sold because ... I think it's true to say Lyons were frightened of volume. We were really becoming a company on its own account, which ... was having a diversification of scale which really couldn't be accommodated. And so, when we came to launch Leo 3 we were quite confident it was the answer. It was three to four years ahead of the IBM 360 and better in several respects. And so the company decided that it would launch quietly ... that's to say we would build two service machines, one in England one in Johannesburg of all places. And they could do two things. They would enable people to try out their work before their machines were installed. We always wanted every machine that we delivered to have working applications as soon as it was switched on at the other end, which is again rather different from what happens normally today. And so it could it could carry out those trial work and it could also carry out service work. Because we wanted to carry on service work. And so there were these two machines and also we would talk to a few people that we knew who were interested already because it becomes a close little community. The people who already have the systems and ourselves and we will talk to anybody who came along who got wind of what was happening. But that was that and it's ... really almost painful to think of what IBM would have done in the same circumstances. So, here was the danger that the ... that the capital engagement was becoming very large indeed. We put down several machines on the floor at the same time. And you ... have money go out in salaries all the time. With cash flow and capital requirements are very, very great and ... I don't think we ever quite faced up to what the potential was. 

I think there were ... there was a dichotomy really. There was Pinkerton and myself, just wanting to launch perfection onto the world. And there was the Lyons top management, with Simmons really feeling that it should be ... limited the extent that was in our financial capacity. And so we didn't drive ahead as forcibly as we might have done ... some would say should have done. 

So the very important large customer we had in the early days of the Leo 3 was the Post Office. The Post Office in those days was probably the largest engineering organization in the country in terms of using engineering and certainly had one of the very most capable Organization and Methods departments. And it was to a considerable extent independent of the rest of the civil service. Because of the quality of its engineering and this organization of methods it was allowed to go its own way. And they quickly cottoned on to the value of Leo 3. They heard further whispers from us about the faster version we were playing with Leo 326 and really saw that as the answer to their needs. So, over the years, we put on many outstanding applications on their ... on their systems and built [a] network of Leo 326s all around the country. Their telephone billing job was certainly the biggest invoicing job in ... we believe ... we thought in the world at that time. Of course, it's all going over to BT now. We built the Premium Bonds business for them. Again, here's a job where legislation says it starts on the given date. And okay, we built it together. We brought the Girobank together that ... that was ... that was privatized a few years ago. But very, very, very, very successfully up in Bootle, very close to Harold Wilson's heart it was [Prime Minister, Member of Parliament for the Huyton constituency near Bootle]. It was he [who] opened it and was very, very chuffed. 

So, ...

INT: But also you were leading up to the mergers by this point.

DC: Well, that was happening at the same time, you see. The ... say two quite different threads, and anybody writing a book finds it extremely difficult I might say to cope with. And here was this enormous success happening. Shellmex and BP came along with another bevy of installations right around the country to cover what was ... the far away the biggest petrol retailing business in the country and in Europe. The 'Her Majesty's dockyards', which was something in those days, had computers in each of their dockyards. Again, using another advance in technology with mark-sense [optical] reading that we'd introduced. 

So, really we could have gone a long way at that time had we been single-minded and ... and really believed in ourselves to take a place in the world scene. One shortcoming was that, even if the government had been forthcoming in its help, and then its accessibility ... still Europe was ... was the place where we should have been operating, as a whole. We needed the whole European market. And, even though we did make sales to the old Dominions [former countries of the Colonies and Empire] and behind the Iron Curtain [Soviet Union and Eastern Europe], we never really penetrated Western Europe at all. And that is something we really needed to do, to match the kind of market capacity that the Americans had.

INT: Can you tell me then about the mergers and the impact they had on you and your colleagues? 

DC: The first merger that we made was with English Electric. Lyons had felt that they did need to have some partner in their enterprise. They didn't feel they could take the whole financial risk themselves. And so they fished around and came up with English Electric. English Electric those days was a very large electrical engineering company one of Britain's two or three largest. They were already in the computer business. But on the commercial side they'd used a machine built in the United States by the RCA company. That's really better known for its colour television than its computers. And so there was a conflict then between the Leo people with their Leo three and the English Electric people with their machine called the KDP 10 which was really rather clapped out by that time. It's been a good machine in its time but it had been technologically surpassed. And the two teams really couldn't really get to work properly together at all. And that's quite common in computers. People get to love what they have so much and so passionately that they find it very difficult to see any virtue in something that comes from elsewhere. So that wasn't a ... wasn't a very happy merger.

In that merger, Pinkerton of course lost his place in as unquestioned leader on the engineering side. He had to share his leadership with other people from the other side. On the business side, Leo kept the lead but it still had to work with people who had quite a different mode of attack and quite a different ethos. In ... on the Leo side people passionately wanting to get work running as well and as smoothly and as efficiently as possible. On the English Electric side they saw their job of selling machines to the customer who would make the machines work. And the difference between the two is enormous when it comes into practice. So it wasn't frightfully ... wasn't a happy relationship. But nonetheless the sales of the Leo threes and three two sixes went on. Then, of course, we come to the later ... later merger. Well, first of all ... first of all, let me say there was the introduction of the system four by ... by English electric 

Many top management things that we decided. First of all they didn't have the money to build a new system of their own. This [was] one of the great problems about computers in that period was the fact that every three or four years was the need to develop a new machine. You made the damn thing work and soon as you've got it to work it was being replaced and it's very, very expensive business. All the software to go with it too. So they decided that they would go to ... back to RCA again for a machine. And I in fact led the inspection party and given the remit, that really we wanted to take on the RCA machine if it could be shown to be satisfactory for our purposes, so long as it does seem satisfactory in its engineering. I'm afraid I had to simply recommend "yes they're okay". We take on the RCA system and on the basis of that build the system four. We carried the Leo thinking right into it we changed the software completely. We built a faster model at the top of the range. But there was a break in ... in that tradition so to speak. But some of us that didn't matter very much because we were concerned not with the nature of the machine but whether it could carry out applications in the way that we wanted. In particular we were concerned could they carry out online work and that machine was very well attuned to it. So there we were with the Leo name has gone out of the company, and it's gone out of the ... out of the system. At least called the system four to follow on after Leo three. But there we were. 

Then of course it was the later takeover into ICL, engineered by government 

INT: So looking back then what particularly, still having a Jubilee conference for 50 years. Well what was the significance of the Leo do you think to computing?

DC: The significance was ... and they really did show that full-scale commercial work could be carried out on a stored program computer. 

INT: And were there also benefits in the number of people involved who went on to other things in computing. 

DC: Certainly, one of the problems we had in Leo was, in the course of these mergers we did lose a good number of people. You lost them for two reasons. One reason was that several people went out to our users. It was difficult to refuse our users ... going on ... on in this venturesome way, this very brave way to refuse them one of our people. And since our people were rather interested ... more interested in making something work properly than going around looking at lots and lots of different places and seeing how they could be made to work. As a consequence, our people weren't unwilling to go out and join other companies. Which generally offered them some more money too which is always useful to people. So we lost a fair number of people in that ... in that time. We lost Peter Herman to Imperial Tobacco and then he went to the British Airways and set up their reservation system and won the Queen's Award from it. We lost Alan Jacobs who went out to him [Peter Herman?] and then went on to lead the computing at Sainsbury. We lost John Lewis who went out to ... Peter Herman. We lost Frank Land who went out to set up the first Systems Analysis Department of any University, when he went back to his old University LSE [London School of Economics]. And so it was. We lost Mike Jackson to Freeman's and [he] carried out a magnificent job on this mail-order business, where he totally reorganized the place and became a director there of the whole show.

INT: Good, that's fine that's some good examples, thanks. Can we ... just I just need to record a little bit of the background sound now to help because of all the jets coming over.

DC:  ... sure sure sure 

INT: can we just sit and silence for half a minute.

DC: And we also used it ... There's one of the jobs very nice operational job for checking out where to dig the iron ore for different mixes of steel. And that That was a beautiful job, we enjoyed that.

[End of recording]

Provenance :
Created and collected by Mike Hally and donated to the LEO Computers Society

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