Audio footage of David Caminer speaking at the John Pinkerton Lecture in 2001. 

Transcript :

Pinkerton Lecture by David Caminer in [YEAR] at [LOCATION]. [Frequency; in memory of John Pinkerton] [Audience?] 

Transcribed and edited by Jon Hales, volunteer at CCH.

[Speaker? It's true to form.]

[David Caminer, giving the lecture, assisted by John Ayres]:
Right now, my theme in this second Pinkerton lecture is Leo and the Computer Revolution. It's a revolution analogous to the Industrial Revolution that started about 200 years before. The Industrial Revolution changed the whole mode of production and transportation. The generality of workers no longer made objects by hand, they were made by machines and the machines were driven not by human muscle but by steam.

In the Computer Revolution, the changes have been different but potentially they are sweeping. Computers have altered the way in which information is accessed and made available. The links between person and person and organization and organization have been radically changed. I'd like to think of Leo, at the time of the first regular ongoing productive business job, as being something like the stage reached in the Industrial Revolution by George Stevenson's locomotive.

Ten years before, our locomotive started its regular haul from the West Durham Coalfield to the estuary at Stockton in 1824, Richard Trevithick had demonstrated that the steam locomotive could indeed work. His engine ran on a tramway from the steelworks at Merthyr [Tydfil] to the National Canal network. It pulled a load of 20 tons faster than the horse could manage. Trevithick's problem, though, was that the load cracked the rails, a typical complaint [of] which our chairman today and past director of engineering at Railtrack has had some experience. So though Trevithick had proved the principle, he couldn't claim to have produced a regular ongoing service.

George Stevenson went that one decisive step further and translated the principle into a service that became part of the economy of North East England. And that is what Leo accomplished in 1951. From its inception in November of that year, the bakery valuations job made a regular contribution to the management accounting of J. Lyons and Company for several years.

Here is a picture of a railway engine of the early years. I'm bound to say it's much better looking than Leo, and a lot smaller. Despite its boiler, it probably gave off a lower heat dissipation.

Now John [Ayres] will now say a few words about Leo's ancestors, J. Lyons in West Kensington, ENIAC on the other side of the Atlantic, and EDSAC in Cambridge. Then I want to look at the first business job executed in the computer revolution. Then John will review some of the most significant early steps as the revolution gathered pace. Finally, I want to anticipate the question that is bound to come, it always does, why if Leo was so far ahead of the field did it disappear from sight after a relatively short time? Why did Britain lose its lead?

[John Ayres]
It's my move, and let me say you're not being fobbed off with something written by me. This is all genuine, good David Caminer stuff that I'm reading for him. I am but the dummy to his ventriloquist.

First, Joe Lyons, the first of the antecedents that David just mentioned, invariably known by everyone 50 years or 60 years ago as Joe Lyons, actually founded in 1894. The company catered initially for some of the largest gatherings ever known, and then went on to build a chain of tea shops. These became the favourite watering holes for shop workers and clerks for their lunches, and they provided a comfortable place for housewives to have a cup of tea after they'd done their shopping. Here is a [photograph of a] typical city tea shop as it was, not very far from here in Cannon Street if you can read the letters on the right.

The next phase in the development of the company came when advanced bakery machinery was installed at the Cadby Hall Estate in West Kensington. To make this powerful equipment fully economic, it was necessary to produce a bigger output than that required simply by the catering activities alone. So within a few years, every corner shop in the country was stocking Lyons' packeted and branded goods. The expansion brought its own problems in its wake. It was one thing to expand production and to organize nationwide distribution. It was another to control all the movements of goods that arose and to keep account of all the thousands and thousands of small transactions. And so the Lyons' ruling family decided to bring in some new blood. It was all a question of adding and multiplying, they argued, so they went to where the best adders and the best multipliers could be found. They recruited a senior wrangler from Cambridge University. His name was John Simmons, and John Simmons is a name to remember when thinking about the computer revolution. When he arrived at Lyons in 1923, there was still a Dickensian atmosphere of clerks standing at tall mahogany desks. If they wanted a rest, they perched on tall stools.

Long before the Second World War, John Simmons had transformed the situation. From the outset, he saw it as his job to provide management with information upon which they could take sound, forward-looking decisions. He moved Lyons from a position where the offices were just bean-counting, as they remain in many places to this day, as was discussed before the break. He moved that to a situation where they guided all levels of management on positive action to improve the bottom line. One consequence of this was that Lyons became a leader in the field of office mechanisation. Along the way, a key step was taken with the establishment of a backroom function that became known as Systems Research, later Organisation and Methods. Its function was to look at all office activity from the viewpoint of its contribution to business needs.

As more advanced office machinery became available, the Systems Research Department's responsibility was not merely to speed up what was being done already. Its job was to examine whether the business needs could now be met in new ways, yielding more help to management along the way. When the idea of building a computer of Lyons' own came along, David had the good fortune, as he puts it, to be manager of Systems Research. So that's the Lyons parentage.

Now for the transatlantic ancestor, ENIAC. I won't say much about that because it was dealt with so authoritatively by Sir Maurice Wilkes in the first Pinkerton Lecture last year. To remind you, ENIAC was built during the last war to meet the needs of the US Army. The US Army had its own mini-army of women mathematicians, carrying out endless calculations to construct ballistic tables for all manner of projectiles in all manner of circumstances. ENIAC failed to be ready in time to make a contribution to the war effort, but it did prove that an electronic computer could deliver productive results. It had a basic weakness, however. It was wired up to perform only one program. It's true that it could be rewired to suit other compatible programs, but there was no question of being able to switch quickly from one program to another.

To rectify this shortcoming, what became known as the von Neumann architecture was devised. This was too late for ENIAC, but it lit a beacon which stimulated computer development everywhere.

The coming together of Lyons and ENIAC took place in 1947, when two senior executives of the Lyons offices visited the United States on a fact-finding mission after the war. Europe had been cut off from the United States for almost ten years, and Lyons was anxious not to be left behind in the field of business methods. The leader of the Lyons party was Raymond Thomson, another Cambridge mathematician. In the event the party never actually saw ENIAC, they had an appointment to see it, but the appointment was cancelled. With its thousands of radio valves and its high heat dissipation, it is little wonder that ENIAC was down from time to time. There is much less excuse now.

However, Thomson and his colleague Oliver Standingford did learn that two Cambridge England academics had spent time at the site and would be well-equipped to advise Lyons if they wanted to go further with the idea of obtaining a computer of their own. Those two academics were Professor Douglas Hartree and Dr. Maurice Wilkes. The report of the tour and the subsequent visit to Cambridge was presented to Simmons. It contained a remarkably perceptive account of how a computer might be used for ordinary office work. It included a firm recommendation that the company should go ahead and acquire one.

Several possibilities for this were seen. One was to buy a machine from America, another was to encourage British office machine manufacturers to build one, another was to persuade the UK government to take a hand, a fourth was to ask Cambridge to build a business version of their machine, and finally there was the proposition that Lyons should build a system of its own, drawing on assistance from Cambridge.

For one reason or another, all the options but this last were discarded as impractical. The offer was therefore made that Lyons would donate £3,000 and the services of a technician for a year if Wilkes would make his work available as a model. The offer was accepted and no one could have been more generous in his help and advice than Maurice Wilkes was over the ensuing period. The Lyons board decision was that they would proceed with the building of a computer so long as and as soon as EDSAC, the Cambridge machine, could be demonstrated performing a live job.

It's worth commenting that at that time Lyons had no electronic personnel whatever. But in anticipation of EDSAC passing the test, an immediate step was to recruit a chief engineer. The young man appointed was John Pinkerton in whose memory these lectures are named. This is his picture. [Photograph]
By training, Pinkerton was a Cambridge physicist. In the war, he'd worked as a boffin in TRE [Telecommunications Research Establishment],  the government research establishment and his area was air defence.

When Maurice Wilkes was asked to vet this applicant for the Lyons job, he answered that he knew him well and that he was just the man for the job. And so Pinkerton proved to be. The aged company secretary of Lyons asked him, "Do you think you can build this machine, young man?" And Pinkerton paused for a moment and then replied, "Yes, I think I can but it might not be very reliable."

He had rapidly absorbed the fact that an essential characteristic of business work was that it had to be done to time. In most scientific calculations of the period, the fact that something was a day or two late would not be a disaster. Business work did not leave that latitude.

In parallel with this appointment, work began on preparing for the utilization of a computer for the Lyons business. In due course, this work was moved out of Systems Research to form a unit of its own. Programming techniques were developed, applications were planned. That was the format. Pinkerton was responsible for designing and building the equipment and Caminer was responsible for putting it to productive work as soon as it was ready.

There were two main engineering tasks now. One was to build an engineered version of EDSAC to serve as the base. The other was to attach ancillary electronic equipment to cope with the special requirements of business work. At the heart of the difference between scientific computing and office work was the volume of input and output. In scientific work, there is generally an enormous amount of calculating, most of it repetitive. It relies on very little data and produces only a small output of results. In business work, on the other hand, the calculations are simple, but the amount of data and results is enormous. So unless provision were made to feed the data into the machine quickly and get the results out quickly, the benefit of the high calculation speed would be squandered.

The initial response was to use magnetic tape even though this was still in its infancy. A leading firm of electrical engineers was enlisted to bring a magnetic tape ancillary system into being. Unfortunately, their approach was too ambitious and the scheme never reached a fully working state.

On the other hand, Pinkerton was well on the way to delivering his part of the system in good order and to time. He commented rightly [wryly?] afterward that the philosophy we had was that we would not change anything in the Cambridge machine if we didn't understand why it was done the way it was. So to start with, since we didn't understand very well why it was done the way it was, we didn't make very many changes at all. That is an over-modest resume of what Pinkerton and his tiny team achieved, but it does convey the spirit of the operation. Like Wilkes, Pinkerton was not trying to cross new thresholds in physics, but to get a system into working order as soon as possible.

[David Caminer speaking:] It was on John Pinkerton's equipment alone that the first business application was carried out. It incorporated only minor additions to the exact facilities, but a great deal had been done to raise the level of reliability. The application we prepared for the basic system was simple as compared with the integrated applications that we were working towards, but there was still testing in that it would be an integral part of the company's management accounting system. It would have to be completed at a time each week if it were to serve that purpose. The application was based on two management techniques that Simmons had introduced over the years. The first was the internal market. Lyons were made up of several different trading divisions or units. Each had its own cost centre or profit centre. When they transferred goods to each other, a charge was raised, just as if the goods had gone outside. The second technique was standard costing. There was a standard price for everything. There was a standard price for materials received from outside suppliers, and every product was costed. There was a standard factory prime cost in which goods were transferred from the factories to the distribution centres. There were standard selling costs for each item for each of the different channels of sale. In the bakery valuations job, the total value for each item for each type of transaction for the week was calculated at the appropriate standard price. The resultant amounts were then passed to the stats [statistics] office, where they were compared with the actual costs incurred and turnover achieved. For example, the aggregated standard labour costs for a bakery would be compared with the wages actually paid. If the actual cost exceeded the standard cost, it is indicated that too many staff might be being employed to produce the outputs achieved, or the grading might be too high for the work required, or, of course, that the sales price might be too low. The whole objective was to enable management at all levels to take action without having to go searching for needles in the haystack of the Lyon's profit and loss accounts. So many companies, even now, don't know where their profits are draining away. I must stress that even though this job was carried out in November 1951, it was in no sense an experiment. We knew when the equipment was due to be ready, and it was our job to have the application ready to run on it. We had innumerable test programs to try out different aspects of the system, but we instinctively knew that only live programs and live data could really give the equipment and the programming techniques the examination that they needed. We had no doubt that our programs and hardware together would pass the examination. It's hard to convey the sense of confidence that was running at the time. We saw it as no great achievement to pass the test. We simply didn't entertain the possibility of failure, and that is how it turned out. On completion 50 years ago, the system delivered the results every week and in good time for years afterward. Two years after this world-first business application, the full-scale Leo business machine was completed. The Leo team had produced an input-output system of its own. Here is a schematic. It was a system with three input channels and two output channels, all working concurrently with the computer's calculating operations. Magnetic tape had been put aside for the time being, and the input transports were punch card readers and electronically sensed paper tape readers. The output was a line printer and a card punch. Data were read into buffer stores so as to be read immediately they were wanted by the calculating unit in the mainframe. Similarly, results were flushed out to the output buffers ready for printing or punching. It was all like a three-ring circus, except there were many more than three things happening at once. It was an enormous triumph for John Pinkerton and his team that the full system was completed to schedule and worked sufficiently reliable, being trusted almost at once with a time-critical, externally visible job. His team, in modern terms, was still laughably small.

The completion of Leo 1 was the second major step in the computer revolution. It had been intended from the outset that the first full-scale integrated application would be payroll. The payroll system that emerged led the world for many years. This is a chart of its process.

I'm awfully sorry that you'll have to wait until you get the printed version to really follow this through, but it was quite exciting. The payroll job operated on the lines of one employee having his pay calculated, while the data for the next employee was being read in from three separate channels, and the pay slip for the previous employee was being printed. In the calculating phase, everything down to updating the state of the employee's loan account was included. PAYE was calculated and deducted with special provision for holidays.
[Where...] The extent of deductions meant that the take-home pay would have sunk below a given level, then only statutory deductions would be taken. To reduce the time taken for the pay packets, net pay was rounded off to half crowns, and the positive or negative balances carried forward to next week, and so on and so on.

This contrasted with the scene several years later in the States, where generally only part of the job was done. In the beginning of 1954, after a searching period of parallel running, 1,700 Cadby Hall bakery employees received their pay packets with their pay slips prepared by Leo. From then on, the payroll job, running through 20,000 [employees], ran regularly in one form or another, so long as lines were in business.

The payroll applications built very closely on what had been done before, while taking advantage of the opportunities offered by the computer. But it came as no surprise that some applications had to be radically altered if the full advantage of the computer was to be obtained.

So I want now to discuss the first example of systems reengineering in the computer revolution. This concerned the office work, concerned with the distribution of goods nightly to each of the 200 or so High Street tea shops. There were hundreds of items, and as freshness was a matter of pride to the company, there was little scope for keeping stocks in store. This is a picture of some of the tea shops and bakery vans waiting to be loaded in the Cadby Hall yard.

We were very conscious, as they were close at hand, that unless the computer produces paperwork punctually, they would not start moving to time. 

Back to the tea shops. There was a manageress in every shop; under the existing system, she filled in ten or more multi-item order forms each day. Analysis showed that if all these entries had to be key-punched, the job could not be done in time for packing to take place the same night. The solution was to have each manageress set up a standard for each item for each day of the week, and only send in alterations for those items she wished to modify. A call centre was set up, staffed by operators, with headsets and card-punches. They phoned each shop at a set time, and the alterations were punched into cards. It was a quasi-online job; it went as far as the technology of 1954 permitted.

A particular advantage of the systems re-engineering was that the manageress had to spend much less time at her desk. She could spend her safe time looking after her customers. The manageresses were a formidable set of women. It was a matter of great satisfaction; I can't tell you how great, when they expressed their appreciation of the change.

I want to go on to Leo's introduction of the concept of outsourcing, though the item hadn't been invented then. IT outsourcing, as most of you know, occurs when an organisation hires some outside body to take over its IT functions, so enabling it to concentrate on its core expertise. Increasingly, businesses and government departments have handed over their equipment, their staff and even their intellectual property rights to the specialists, often from overseas. It might be said that like most good things, you can have too much of it.

Using Leo, the first stage of business outsourcing occurred with the provision of a service for the payroll of the Ford Motor Company in 1955. Leo analysts produced a job specification that was approved by the head (that is, Ford) management. The Leo staff then produced the programmes training Ford staff to be able to make changes if and when these became necessary. After trials, the programmes were put into effect. The clock card data were brought by courier across London at a due time, and the Leo organisation returned the completed pay data in the same way. Traffic congestion was less daunting then.

Previously, engineering and actuarial organisations had had their work done in this way, many of them on Leo, but this was the first time anywhere that a business firm had offloaded a routine, time-sensitive body of work. It was a very brave decision by a senior administrator who put his reputation at stake.

[John Ayres] Eventually, to provide cover for the payroll and other Lyons' jobs, a second Leo was produced, and copies of this second machine were installed on the premises of a number of forward-looking office organisations. These included the Steelworks at Corby, the Imperial Tobacco Company in Bristol, the Ford Motor Company's spares depot at Aveley, and the Ministry of Pensions and Social Security in Newcastle.

By this time, Leo computers were running what amounted to a high-powered consultancy and software house, as well as a computer production line and a service bureau. And from all this experience came Leo 3. John Pinkerton set out in Leo 3 to give the consultancy staff what they wanted in terms of facilities and of performance, and at the same time he embodied the rapid technological advances that had occurred. There were no longer thousands of fallible valves; germanium transistors, silicon crystals, and ferrite cores with the materials with which he worked. The machine was very much faster, the fast store was very much bigger, and there was backup storage on magnetic tape and drums. There was much less heat to get rid of, the whole ensemble was altogether more reliable, and there were new features.

The most important new feature was that more than one programme could operate at the same time. The feature was known as multi-programming, or then time-sharing. Several quite unconnected programmes could run concurrently under the control of the operating system. The system as a whole was particularly attuned to online working, and the first steps in that direction were taken.

All in all, the Leo 3 system that started work in 1961 was reckoned to be at least three years ahead of the IBM 360 in terms of the facilities it provided. In the year 1964, that the IBM 360 was announced, the Post Office, already a large-scale Leo user, awarded the biggest computer order ever placed in Europe. It was for a network of Leo 326 systems right round the country, handling telephone billing, national savings, premium bonds, as well as applications for other government departments.

Later, those machines were used to introduce the Giro [electronic transactions]. In its day, the telephone invoicing operation was the biggest computer billing job in the world. Announcing the big order, the Postmaster General of the day, one Tony Benn, expressed satisfaction that a British company had been capable of standing up to and beating on its own merits the competition from overseas.

So that is an outline of how the computer revolution was set in motion by a British tea shops company. The computer revolution still has a long way to go, but Britain has a lot of catching up to do now. Our desk computers and our home computers mostly use operating systems developed on the Pacific coast of the United States. Their processor chips also come from across the Atlantic. Computers are put out of action by viruses as virulent as the diphtheria bug that carried off children at the start of the industrial revolution. Eternities are spent by users getting their systems onto the air again. Computers, many, many more times as powerful as the most powerful Leo, lie abandoned. Millions of pounds have been spent on government and business installations that have never met their specifications. So we need to learn from the past and to ask the questions.

Why, if Leo was so much in the forefront of the computer revolution when it started, did it not retain that lead? Why did the United Kingdom become a second-class nation in IT, a follower rather than a leader? How do we get into the front rank again?

These are potent questions that have been asked not only about business computers. They've also been asked about other inventions that have emerged in this country and then been swallowed up elsewhere in the exploitation stages. That's true, for example, of Leo's counterpart in the industrial revolution, the railways. We're a long way behind even there now.

In Leo's case, there was a mixture of internal weaknesses and external forces that led to the decline. It is fitting that we should examine these briefly to try to prevent the same errors from afflicting us again. I suppose one prime weakness was that Leo had a sugar daddy in J. Lyons. It is comforting to be freed of financial worries while history is being made, but it is more than likely that those worries will catch up with you later. A good many dot-com companies have found that out.

The worries caught up with Leo just when John Pinkerton had produced what was another world-beating machine. There had been no difficulty in finding the funds while the operation was still small scale, and when Lyons itself was doing well and increasing its profits year by year. But times were different now. Lyons was needing all the funds that it could muster for its core businesses. The scale of their computer diversification had gone too far.

Accordingly, when the time came to launch Leo 3, it was decided that it would not be attended by the fanfare of trumpets that might have been expected. Emphasis would instead be placed on two bureau systems, one in London and the other in Johannesburg. Further sales of the system would be obtained by confidential whispers to existing customers, and to users of the bureau services, and to such large scale businesses that presented themselves as word got around.

I don't think I need to say more. Just think of IBM following that strategy for the introduction of the 360 range three years later.

Instead Lyons chose to reduce its exposure to the computer business by forming a partnership with what was then a leading electrical machinery manufacturer, English Electric. This was not a suitable combination for fostering the computer revolution. It is fair to say that I, David, know of no computer merger anywhere where there has been added value from the merger of competing forces of engineers, marketers, and programmers. It is like two civilizations trying to come together.

The merger of Leo and English Electric wasn't as bloody as the coming together of the Incas and the Conquistadors, but sometimes it seemed just as unpleasant, and to both parties.

When the time came for a new computer range, English Electric went across the Atlantic to its licensing partner RCA, better known for its colour televisions. And that signalled the end of the development of the Leo mark, though installations continued very successfully for several years thereafter.

[David Caminer speaking] Looking back over the years, it's tempting to beat our breasts. Our vision was too blinkered. We were too occupied with making work whatever we were engaged with. We took too much satisfaction in working on a shoestring. We were too often arrogant about always knowing best. And we had no idea, and nor did anyone, of the rapid rate of technological advance.

What of the external forces? The first of these was the size of the market. From first to last, Britain was Leo's home market. There were sales in the old dominions and behind the iron curtain, but none at all, not even a service job, in Western Europe or the Americas. Everything was too small scale, as compared with the vast United States domestic market. Western Europe as a whole would have produced a comparable market, but there was never, in those days, any likelihood of that happening.

Then there was the failure of the UK governments over the period to play a truly constructive part. The financial assistance that they felt able to give was pathetic compared with what was happening in the States. Over the early period, IBM was given more in development contracts with the US defence Department than the total amount spent on development by all the fragmented British companies together. Other US companies profited in the same way.

In Britain, such little help as was available went towards scientific computing. [Murray ?] Laver, some of you might remember, the senior servant who later became responsible for government computerization, commented candidly, "In Britain generally, we were slow to realize that the computer market for commercial work would outgrow and greatly exceed the market for science and engineering." Unhappily, that realization came much too late.

Finally, there was a national malaise that made the going hard for Leo. On our coast-to-coast tour of the United States in 1958 to see where best practice had reached, John Pinkerton and I were bowled over by the difference in attitude to innovation. At home, we were still fighting to convince big business that computers were the gateway to the future. In the States, we found highly expensive machines being installed in quantity. The American psyche had taken off.

We were often mystified as to how the cost of the big IBM and Univac systems had been justified. With only one exception, none of the installations we saw in action, and we saw most of the leading actions, leading installations, was as venturesome or as integrated as what we'd left behind on Leo 1. But the Americans had sensed that this was the way forward and were anxious to take their place at the front.

There was scarcely a breath of this at home. Charles Babbage, the grandfather of automatic computing, had encountered the same syndrome a hundred years earlier. Here is a picture of the grand old man of automatic computing. I will leave it up while I recall his words.

He said, listen carefully, "Propose to an Englishman any principle or any instrument however admirable and you will observe that the whole effect of the English mind is directed towards finding some difficulty, defect or improbability in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling potatoes, he will pronounce it impossible. If you peel potatoes with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless because it cannot slice pineapples. Expose the same principle or show the same machine to an American and you will observe that the whole effort of his mind is to find some new application of the principle, some new use of the machine."

I can only add that we have to recognize that syndrome and eradicate it. Otherwise we will never regain the place in the forefront of the computer revolution that Wilkes and Pinkerton and those that worked with them won for us. Let's start from here.
[End of lecture]

Ladies and gentlemen, the lecture is now open for general discussion. Would anyone who wishes to speak, and I can identify them, you're asked to announce your name and affiliation. Clearly this is a professional meeting and we look forward to technical, professional, historical points to be made. I should just advise you, technical press have been invited and may well be present. If in fact you wish, well there is sometimes a correlation. If you actually wish to make the point that your contribution should not be reported, please say so up front. Maybe a member of the press will take account of that.

With those caveats, could I ask anyone for comment or question?

[Colin Tully, now at Middlesex University.] I'd just like to add a little tiny increment to that wonderful presentation. I joined LEO in 1960 when LEO III was a glimmer in John Gosden's eye. John is here now ... and also of course [in] Pinkerton's [eye]. The first thing that happened was that the selection process was very unusual because they selected people for their ability to learn. What we did, we were put on a one day training course and examined. And of course nobody then knew about computers, so there were people there who got degrees in classics or in my case economics or history or whatever. And we were all taught for a day on computers and then we were given an exam and we did well or not and then we were interviewed and that went on late into the evening. I remember actually I was so pleased at passing the interview and being given the job that I rushed back to get a very late train home and got a penalty for jumping on the train when it was moving. How enthusiastic I was. Now the remarkable thing is this. I joined the company and I spent five weeks on a training course and I spent a little bit of time working on Leo 2 and then one day somebody said to me, "We've got a new job for you." Now I'd been there about three months and what they wanted me to do was to write part of the Leo 3 operating system. Now this is not boasting. I'd only been there three months and I was put on this job and there was one other guy; two people wrote that with a supervisor and none of us knew that what we were doing was impossible that hadn't been done before. We were told to do it and we did it. Now the office layout you may have seen in films of old offices. There was a supervisor sitting at the front with his back to the wall and little lines of people and desks in front of them facing. Now Leo3 software, which was wonderful, was developed by a few little lines of people. Two on the operating system, probably David will correct me if I'm wrong, four on the assembly code translator, probably about five on the CLEO compiler and CLEO was a lot better than COBOL and before it. One guy for sorting and probably a few other bits and pieces. That was the total team that developed the software for Leo. Managed by one guy. And nowadays that's just mind-boggling and the management quality, okay the marketing wasn't very good, but the management qualities of that company were amazing. They were just mind-blowing and it was, one was given total freedom to create and therefore one exercised one's own self-discipline, one felt one had to. There was absolute loyalty, total excitement and it was the most wonderful time of my life and I just want to thank these guys.

[David Caminer] The only response I can make to that is to say that I remember going for a salary rise to the old Company Secretary that took on John Pinkerton and as we went through the list of the people I was taking the increment list into for his say-so and he says the important thing you know is you must get people with the right intellect, but far more important than that is character. And I suppose we had our success in Leo because in that day-long interview with several different minds exercising themselves on it, we did seek for character and to all the ex-Leo people in the room, let me thank you, you satisfied that test of character and became a team which really could accomplish anything it was set to do. I might say that that number of people that Colin Tully has mentioned as building our first big operating system was a small army in our terms, it wasn't very small at all.

[Colin Tully, again] It's worth mentioning that the very small team that John Pinkerton had that David mentioned in the lecture was actually in single figures, it was a single figure number of people that designed and built that computer.

[You need to switch on] Is it working? I'd like to come in here because I was the manager of one of David's first installations at Shellmex and BP, we're now talking about 1961. And, I joined from the army having set up the operation down in Worthington and it was quite interesting to go from an IBM installation, being absolutely new, to come to Leo which was equally new, but I'd just like to make the point with the support actually of David and his team, within a year we were creating accounts for 10,000 deliveries which were made each day and that has been developed ever since, it's controlled the deliveries, it's made the invoicing, it's done the accounts but we are talking about 1961 and everything was done on time, programmes were out on time, it was all done within the budget, David thank you.

[David Caminer] I think I should ask the senior consultant who was engaged on that job to respond.

[John Gosden] Thank you, thank you very much Donald. And contribution, question, gentleman over here, could you bring the microphone, thank you.

[Speaker not named ...] I just have a little vignette for you about how Leo hired people. My degree was in politics and I did some social anthropology and Peter Herman interviewed me, he has a double first in math and I got hired and I managed to go through the programming course and I started programming and I remember going to John Gosden and saying, John when you write 2 and this little 2 on top of it, what does it mean? And he very kindly explained and didn't tell anybody and I excused myself that it was a question of language not of ignorance. But one more thing, whatever I brought away from Leo I eventually took with me to Canada to a company which was a subsidiary of Ferranti, Ferranti Bacard and I will tell you that the degree of ignorance of general management about what the potential of a computer was, ... many of the ideas we brought to the company in Canada and I distinctly recall having to chase the managing director through the clubs and bars of Toronto in order to get him to sign a contract with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he had no clue what the significance of that was. So we weren't alone in Leo in not having government support and other kind of support, it seems to have been, I don't know, maybe it's something to do with the weather here.

[John Gosden] Gentleman there in the middle.

[Are we on? Yes. Malcolm Birchell, I am also an ex-Leo engineer but mine is actually a question. In your write up about IBM and their money that they were getting from the government, you mentioned the figure of $400 million, was that $400 million in 1950 type money?

[David Caminer] No, any money I mentioned was in that money.

[MB] It was. That's a hell of a lot of money for 1950.

[DC] They did have huge contracts and they did some very fine work for the government.

[MB] Well, compared with the fact that Leo got sold for less than 2 million pounds, I think it was pretty good.

[JG] Over here please.

[Speaker: Matthew Caminer] Matthew Caminer, this is not a planted question. I was 10 weeks old living in David's household when Leo 1 went live. I was just thinking about the comments of the speaker along here and the quotation from Babbage and thinking back to the panel discussion we had just a few minutes earlier and thinking how introverted we can be in IT, and I am an IT worker, and I am wondering whether we actually make matters worse for ourselves and get ourselves even more into the problems that Babbage was talking about by being so introverted and thinking of IT problems rather than business problems, IT projects rather than business projects.

[David Caminer] He's left me speechless. No, the fact was that when we set Leo on foot, it was entirely to meet the business problems of J. Lyon's company. We didn't see the world at large. We were really focused on just that one necessity. The Lyons [company] really had reached as far as advanced a state as was possible on the existing equipment that were available and we really did need something new if we were going to move forward. We didn't feel very much like feeling stationary and so we went on this - really looking back at it now - was a mad hat idea of building a computer. We said earlier when we just made that decision, we didn't have an electronic engineer in the whole company of 30,000 people, I suppose. We traded on our ignorance of the problems that we might have. So there it is, we produced Leo and we made it work because we had business to do and that is how equipment should be developed now because it has tasks to complete and because it has work to do, not because engineers have some bright idea or entrepreneurs have other bright ideas for making money. It should be to really meet business needs.

[John Gosden], very early Leo. I worked very closely, it's getting to me, with David Caminer and John Pinkerton. I find it difficult to credit what they were able to get me to do. David hired me and scared me to death for three or four years and I learned a fantastic amount about accounting and control of business records. He made us do double entry book-keeping on everything including matrix inversion. John Pinkerton I worked with very closely and travelled between their site and Cadby Hall a lot of the time. He became a wise mentor to me and helped me greatly in putting projects together. I was the one who tracked the American capabilities. I got copies of every IBM manual that was in sight and some of those that weren't. And I don't think I scared Leo people enough about that. I saw it coming faster than they did. They were busy getting on with the real stuff, churning out the publications, but the Americans were really rolling, really rolling.

[David Caminer] I should say that John Gosden who's just spoken was our first consultant who was head-hunted to go to America and he went there and had a very distinguished career in the course of which at one time he chaired a committee deciding on the data processing requirements for the President of the United States. Thank you John.

[John ...] I think there was a last contribution at the back on the left. Someone wish to speak? I saw a hand.

Hello, hello is this on? Yes, a question about the interdisciplinary team that you were describing because obviously in the earlier days of Leo there weren't any IT professionals as such. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the insights that were gained from those people from a non-classical technical perspective.

[David Caminer] The people that we engaged for programming came from a whole variety of disciplines. There were one or two mathematicians, one or two who had rather distinguished university careers but there were other people like historians and as you heard Paul Dickson say, I forget what it was Paul, but it all sounded very, very splendid, and there was John Ayres here who was a classicist who constantly amazes me with his recall of what Thucydides did on some apposite occasion and so the people we had together were something like a small university. There were really people who were experts in everything and ideas bounced off everybody. It was really quite wonderful atmosphere but the great thing was that everybody worked together. I've come to the conclusion that you can't get a really successful project team unless it's also a social team. People play together as well as work together. When they came together for their coffee, if they could spare the time for coffee, then they would be talking about each other's jobs. If anybody had a problem, somebody would chime in to help it. When programs were written, and in those days it was rather important to make a repetitive loop as short as possible, it doesn't matter now with all the resources that people have, in those days it really was important and so we passed programs from hand to hand and the great joy was to cut one instruction off the loop. I don't think people quite see it in that way now, I'm afraid that information technology has matured and people go to work from nine to five like everybody else, they all become bank clerks.

[David Caminer]
[Host ] I think with that quite interesting philosophical comment about the nature of the new IT, just before I invite Professor Frank Land to propose a vote of thanks, I feel very privileged to have been present tonight to listen to the story of Leo and I'm sure everyone here feels that too. I think it's - as someone who used computers in the 60s. What I think I've heard tonight was a story of a team that had energy, enthusiasm, intelligence and the ability to innovate. It is interesting that the operating systems that resulted from this initial work that one saw on the KDF9 machines and then on the ICL1900 machines, those operating systems in the late 60s and early 70s were streets ahead of operating systems on commercial machines produced across the North Atlantic because I had the unpleasant experience of buying a large Honeywell machine and realizing the operating system was actually, I suppose you say, backwards to the future in the sense that the operating system I then had at my disposal was considerably less flexible and really rather repetitive and boring to use and I think that's where the ingenuity and innovation that we've heard tonight actually got the UK industry. However, just a comment from a user.

[Host] I think Professor Land, I'd like you to propose a vote of thanks to our speakers this evening.

[Professor Frank Land] Thank you. Professor Mallett, Lord, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to propose a vote of thanks to our main speaker, David Caminer, to his dummy, John Ayres, much more than a dummy but... And perhaps to say that in a curious way, the focus nowadays, for example, when we've talked to the press, has been on why did this venture fail when the focus should be on why did it succeed, and it did succeed. It's quite incredible that a tea shop company built a computer, built a market for their computer, built the hardware and software for it all by itself, and survived in a hard competitive market for 20 years. Who would have predicted that at the beginning or almost at any stage in that development? So I want to say thank you very much for the fascinating story and the account you gave, but to perhaps echo your final words, let's, in this country, develop the spirit which we had in Leo which led to such success.

Thank you. Thank you.

[Host] Ladies and gentlemen, now that the presentation is over, could I first of all say everyone present is invited to a drinks reception which will be held in the Guildhall crypt. Members of staff will be available outside to help us to get to the crypt. Can I also say that some of the audience, not everyone, has actually booked for dinner. That will actually commence in the great room at 8 o'clock.

But can I just ask you again to thank our excellent speakers for what has been a fascinating evening I'm sure for everyone. Thank you very much. (applause)

Provenance :
Collected by Hilary Caminer and donated to the LEO computers Society

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