An interview with Martin Booth conducted by David Phillips on 26 January 2021, as part of the LEO Computers Society Oral History Project.

Transcript :

Interview with Martin Booth (Part 1) by David Phillips. 
Communicating via 'Zoom'. 

Transcribed and edited by Jon Hales, volunteer at CCH.

INT: It's the 26th of January 2021 and I'm David Phillips interviewing Martin Booth to give  us the story of his involvement with Leo Computers from the earliest days.  So Martin, we're recording this interview as part of the Leo Computers Society oral  history project.  The audio version and the transcript will be lodged at a central archive and made available  for researchers and members of the public.  But now may I ask you to introduce yourself, please, Martin.

MB: I'm Martin Booth.  I was born on the 8th of February 1941 at the early part of the war.  My father was in the RAF at Biggin Hill, which was where I was born, and my mother was not  working and never has done.  My father after the war, ... he was a radio operator in the war, and after the war, he became a  radio and television engineer and he worked at that until he retired.

INT: In a shop or as a freelancer, how did it work?

MB: No, he worked for a company that rented out televisions because televisions in the early  days were notoriously unreliable.  So he used to go around repairing televisions for customers.

INT: So you had a television at home, presumably?

MB: No, he used to bring one home every now and then.  And he made an aerial out of a long broom handle on the end of a pole stuck up in the  garden and ran a wire up that, but we didn't have a television ourselves until I was about  11.

INT:  Tell us a bit about your early days then, about schooling, etc.

MB: I was educated at Bromley Grammar School.  I went there in 1952 and maths was my favourite subject.  I was good at maths and I left Bromley Grammar in 1959 with 11 O-levels and 4 A-levels.  There was no such thing as career advice in those days, so I was really left to my own  devices as to what I did after I left school.

INT: What about university, did you think about that?

MB: Couldn't afford it.  In those days it was not an easy option, 1952 we're talking about, it was not an easy option  for families, unless they could afford to support the child at university, not very easy.  But I was never really keen on going further anyway.  I always had my eye on the wider world, so to speak.  I enjoyed sport, I played football and cricket and tennis for the school, I played basketball  for the school, I played football and cricket for the village, and I liked the outside life.

INT: Which village was that?

MB: Biggin Hill.

INT: Oh I see, that was considered a village.

MB: It was a village, right next to the airfield.

INT: So all right,. So what did you decide to do, what was the first job?

MB: Well I went to the Careers Advice, the Youth Employment Bureau at Bromley and asked them  what sort of things they felt I should go for, and they, one of the things they came  up with was working in maths departments of places like Aldermaston and organisations like  that.  But I in fact took an aptitude test for one of those and got nowhere.

 They then said that they had a company called Lyons which had a computer, and I had never  heard of a computer, and I don't think there were many around at that time.  And they got me an interview for that, and I went along to Lyons and had a day having  introductory sessions, talking about what computers are and what programming is, and  we did a visit to Leo 1, and that was interesting.  Then we went to the 'Horster Glider' [unclear] that was down the road, and to sit an aptitude test.  After the aptitude test, that was the end of all of the formalities, and I went for  an interview then, at the end of the day, with Peter Wood, who was the manager of Leo 2-1.  He looked down at the papers, he looked up at me, and he said, "You made the right mess  of that, didn't you?"  Which I thought was a pity because I thought I'd done rather well.  So I thought when I left that was the end of that.  But two or three days later, I had a phone call from him to say that they had suddenly  got a vacancy for a job assembly clerk on Leo 1.  Was I interested?  So I said yes, and he said, "Well, can you start on Monday?"  I said, "Yep."  And that was it.  November 5th, 1959, I turned up at Leo 1 to start work on Leo. INT: What did they offer you as a pay, as a salary?

 If I remember rightly, it was 7 pounds, 8 shillings and three-pence a week.

INT: Was that considered good money?

MB: It did to me.

INT: What did your parents think about this, particularly your father?

MB: I think the father around that time was on about £1,000 to 1,100 a year, something like that.  So yeah, they were quite happy about it.  And we weren't a rich family, quite modest family with modest means.

INT: Brothers and sisters?

MB: I had a brother two years older than me, Ian, now departed this life, I'm afraid.  And it's a natural thing to do.  It's a job, the money was quite acceptable, I was able to give my mum money each week  for my keep.

INT: How did you travel to and fro?

MB: There was a Green Line bus, a 705, which ran from Seven Oaks to Windsor, went through  Biggin Hill and Hammersmith.  So I could get on the bus, the Green Line in the morning, go off to sleep, and they'd  give me a prod when I got to Cadby Hall.  What time did you start at Cadby Hall?

INT:  What time did you start?  Were you working shifts?

MB: No, no, no.  Job Assembly Clark was 9 to 5.30.  And shifts, I didn't do shifts in the early days.

INT:  Can you tell me what Assembly Clerk actually did?

MB: Right, the role of the Job-Assembly Clerk was to prepare all of the things ready for  the jobs to run on the computer.  There were trolleys there which had spaces for drawers which held the punch cards.  So I had a library of punch card cabinets with the punch cards for each job.  The last time it was run, the current run, and the next run.  And I had to put out the things on the trolleys for the jobs to be run, put the operating  instructions on the trolley as well, and basically filing them all when the jobs had been run.

INT: Was it difficult, difficult or tricky?

MB: Not once you knew what was going on, no, and that took me a little while to know what was  going on because I'd never heard of a computer, never seen a computer.  When I first went there, it seemed totally alien.  There were people rushing around between pieces of equipment.  There were men in long white coats who looked like doctors, they were the engineers, and  it was, it was quite a thrilling environment.  The sound was quite, it was great as well.

INT: What do you mean?

MB: Well the, the noise that the computer made, Leo 1, I've no doubt you've heard broadcasts  of Leo 1 noises and Leo 2 noises, and it was nice.

INT: Were you actually in the room with Leo 1?

MB: Yes, there is on the, on the new Leo interactive website plans of the, the computer room etc,  which I helped to provide information for. [LEO Society virtual LEO 1 at Cambridge]  The, the job assembly area was in one corner of the of the computer room, the opposite  corner to where the computer itself was, and it was next to the operations area.  So we were in constant contact.  I used to help with various bits and things during the day, I used to sort the punched  cards that came for the, the tea shops ordering system, and then when the job had been finished  my last job of the day was to sort the cards back again, ready for them to go back to,  to the user.

INT: Any, any incidents?  Did you ever drop all the cards or?

MB: Oh yes, yes, in fact in my early days there, one of the things I discovered was that if  I looked at my card in the, in the, in the payroll data file, for this week and the output  for next week, I could work out how much I was going to get paid at the end of the week.  Unfortunately, on one occasion I put them back the wrong way, which caused discrepancies  when the payroll was next run.

INT: You were rumbled were you?

MB: Yes, well Bill Steele was the, the operations manager, sorry not the operations manager,  the Chief Operator at the time, and one day we were going across to the canteen for lunch  and he suddenly turned to me and he said, "What's your clock number?"  So I told him, and he, he exploded in the middle of the yard and called me all the silly  whatsits that's under the sun for putting the cards back in the right, for accessing the  cards in the first place and putting them back in the wrong order in the second place,  which I thought was quite reasonable.

INT: That was the end of that, there were no ramifications.

MB: No, no, no, no, no, it was a great environment to work in.  When I, when I first went there, Bill Steele was the, the Chief Operator, Norman Beasley  was one of the shift leaders, Eric Housden and Ray Strickland were the other two shift  leaders, and Terry Piercy was the, the Manager, and the room next door to the computer room.

INT: Sorry to interrupt you, I just need, I'm not sure, do any of those names need spelling?  Any tricky names there, would you think ?

MB: Steele's got an 'e' on the end, right, other than that the others should be normal spelling.  Housden was H-O-U-S-D-E-N. But the room next door was the data prep room, and the manager  in there was Derek Jolly, and the room was full of, oh, young women who were fairly noisy  and quite intimidating. I was a young, innocent, shy 18 year old, and the, it had the, the  nickname of the snake pit, and not without good reason.  If I had to go through the data prep room to go through into the, into the stairwell  at the, at the other side, I used to fix my eyes on the, on the other door and walk as  quickly as I could without looking to the right or the left. And if you've ever had  wolf whistles in your life, it is, it's quite fun. But yeah, it, it opened my eyes to a  number of things.

INT: How long were you in this Job-assembly job?

MB: Only a few weeks, no, a few months, and then I went on to shifts on Norman Beasley's shift,  and he was good.  Bill and Norman taught me an awful lot about binary, binary decimal, interpretation of  cards, what the computer was and what it did, and they gave me a very good grounding in,  in computers, because as I said, I had never seen or heard of a computer before.

INT: Why were they giving you this training?  They were, they had a job in mind for you.

MB: No, just so that I could understand the, the job better, the, the job assembly activity  and the operations of the computer, because it wasn't just a straightforward question  of putting up stationery and, and running the jobs.  The operators really had a great interaction with the computer program itself.  I remember when graduated pension came in, we had to stop the, the printer every 10 minutes  or so and calculate the, the graduated pension manually, just in case the computer wasn't  working properly. And the, the computer was quite sensitive to, to things and would quite  regularly drop bits from the, the instructions, which would make the, the programs run peculiarly,  so you had to be on the alert for, for abnormal things.  The noise played a big part, each job had its own unique noise that the computer made  while it was processing, and on the operator console, there was a ..., the central display  showed the contents of the, the memory in binary form, and the, the program would halt  quite frequently with a halt condition, and you had to determine what that condition was  and why, and whether or not it was genuine. So it, there was a lot of interaction with  the, the running of jobs on, on those computers.

INT: But did you, were you still an assembly person at that point, or had you moved up into operations?

MB:  I was on the, on shift operations with, with Norman, Norman Beasley on his shift.

INT: Right.  How did you find shift working?

MB: Great. I loved it.  One of the big things I remember is that the ..., the canteen for lunch that we used to go to,  the meals were one shilling for a three course meal, and they were excellent, heavily subsidized,  but the best of all was when you're on the night shift, because on the night shift, you  used to go up to the, the director's dining room on the, the top floor of WX Block, and  there was a resident night chef there who would cook meals. And the food there was quite excellent  and free. So it was good.

INT: What about the traveling home overnight?

MB: Not a problem, because the, the shift finished normally at eight o'clock the following morning.

INT: When did they start then? Give me the shift times, can you, approximately?

MB: I think the, the day shift would have been 8.30 until, until 2.30, maybe three o'clock.  There was an overlap in the afternoon with the evening shift, which finished at 11, and  the ..., the time gap in the ..., in the morning was always when the engineers took the machine  to do testing. So the overlap on the, in the afternoon between the day shift and the evening  shift was intended so that any further training that needed to be done or things, extra things  to be done could be accomplished with the extra people.

INT: Very good, so how did you find night shift working? Could you stay awake?

MB: Yes, no problem. It was ..., you got very used to, I got very used to, to doing it ...  I was  not married at the time, so it was quite easy to adjust my outside activities to fit, and  it was good.

 On Leo 1, the night shift was only three nights, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, because the, the  dominant applications there were payrolls, so it was good, you had the rest of the week  to unwind and, and ..., and ready for the, for the following week.

INT: What work were you doing there, this, this payroll was the Lyons payroll, or did you  have other outside payrolls coming in?

MB: On Leo 1, we had the ..., the Lyons payrolls. There were payroll for the hourly paid, the  weekly paid, the monthly paid, with different runs for the different divisions.  We did the, the Ford Dagenham payroll. I think they were the only payrolls from ..., on Leo 1. The other applications were things like the, the daily tea shops ordering, bakery rounds,  bakery valuations, tea blending, and, and things like that.  Quite time consuming, because the ..., the computer wasn't dramatically quick, and it was quite  important to get the jobs off as quickly when they finished, to get the new one up and running  quickly, which is why people were always running around. If the machine stopped, you need to  quickly sort out why and get it going again.  Every second counted.

INT: What sort of things would stop it functioning properly?

 With payroll, 

INT: Why anything really, why would the machine stop, or the computers malfunction  in some way?

MB: Card misreads, peripheral failure, misalignment between the ..., the amendments that are being  put through and the, the brought forward data, the data was held on punch cards, brought forward,  carry forward, punched cards. Input data, almost exclusively, apart from the tea shops  application, was punched paper tape, and if there was an error with the ..., the paper tape,  it would stop, if there were problems with the sequencing of the cards, it would stop.  If the computer hiccupped, it would stop, the most noticeable failure with the computer  would be what was called a 'ZOT', Z-O-T, which stood for zero order tank. And so when you  looked at the screen, there was nothing there, and that would be where the computer had just  given up the ghost.

INT: What happened then?

 Pardon?

INT: What happened then, you'd have to rerun it?

MB: You went back to the restart procedure, restart, the most recent restart point, and run from  there.

INT: Okay.

MB: So there was, you needed to, you needed to be on your toes all the time to monitor whether  the, the peripherals needed extra cards being fed, whether the card output device had sufficient  cards, get an extra reel of paper tape ready, and react quickly when something needed to  be done.

INT: What was your impression of the Leo-1 setup, because it was quite a big machine, wasn't  it?

MB: It was enormous.  Yeah, it's hard to give an impression really, without something to relate to, the physical  size of the computer was quite something. There were 32 mercury delay tubes, six foot  long mercury delay tubes, under the floor at the back of the computer room, which was the  main storage for the computer, and everything was clean, spotlessly clean.

INT: But it wasn't air conditioned?

MB: No, not completely, it was partially, but not completely, there was a refrigeration  unit over the back to keep the, to keep the, the underfloor, mercury delay tube to the  constant temperature, but no real air conditioning, no.

INT: But it was a valve machine, big racks of valves, I believe.

MB: Oh yes.  The engineers used to have a pickaxe handle, and in order to test the computer, they used  to go up and down between the racks, dragging the pickaxe handle along the cabinets, to  try to highlight dry joints.

INT: Like wheel tappers?

MB: Yeah, but not physically tapping, but just agitating, to try to highlight any dry joints  that might need to be repaired.  So there are engineers on shift all the time that the computer was running.  So it was, it was quite a major, a major task in the morning, in between the night shift  and the day shift starting, I used to run their test programmes just to verify that  everything, [coughs] excuse me, everything was working properly.

INT: So did you work with the programmers that would come into test programmes?

MB: No, with hindsight, there was very little new applications being put on to ..., certainly  on Leo 1, and very few onto Leo 2-1 in those days.  With hindsight, it was clear that with the advent of the Bureau of Operations at Hartree  House, the, excuse me [coughs], not used to talking for so long.

INT: Do you want some water?

MB: No, there are very few new applications, so on Leo 1, we only saw programmers when programmes  need to be, needed to be altered, and they came along and tested.

INT: Was there much turnover of the staff there?  Did they move to other computers that were being assembled, being built, installed?

MB: Certainly with Leo 1, on Leo 1, the manager, as I said, was Terry Pearcy.  He went, I'm not sure where he went to [coughs], but I came across him in later years.  He owned a data prep bureau near Horsham.  Bill Steele, soon after I went there, moved to Hartree House.  And Norman, he ..., after I moved to [Leo] 2-1, Norman went to Leo 37 in Lyons to become the chief  operator there.

INT: So how long were you on Leo 1, and were you aware of other computers being developed and  installed within Leo?

MB: Aware of them vaguely, yes, but while I was on Leo 1, not really ... any great detail.

INT: I just wondered if there was a feeling amongst the people working on Leo 1 that they would  like to graduate, as it were, to the newer machines that were being developed?

MB: Derek Jolley from the data prep area, he went to Hartree House as well.  I moved across to Leo 2 in Elm's House, Leo 2-1 in Elm's House, in 1961. And certainly  there, there was much more evidence of people moving to other installations, to customer  installations as they were going out for the first time, and things like that.

INT: This was because Leo 2s were being, well, shall I say, mass produced, but produced in  numbers and sold to other commercial organisations?

MB: Yes, that's right.  When I went to Leo 2, the chief operator was Bill McMillan, the Manager was Peter Wood.  The manager was Peter Wood, he was the one that interviewed me originally. And the shift  leaders were Ian McMillan, Bill's brother, Graham Limpkin [inaudible], and Peter Smith.  That last one I'm not too sure about, it might have been someone that we called Big Jim.  And we called him Big Jim because we had another Jim there who we called Little Jim. And Little  Jim went to be an operator at CERN when that started up.  Bill McMillan went to Hartree  House very quickly, Graham Limpkin went to South Africa with Leo 3-2. And the ... awareness  of people being able to move on to other machines was much greater on Leo 2.  There's much more of a sense on Leo 2 of the Leo family evolving. As you say,  the Leo 2s were still being sold, and the Leo 3 was about to be introduced.  Hartree House was growing, it was a bureau operation, and as a bureau operation, it tended  to take outside work, whereas Leo 2-1 was almost a dedicated Lyons machine, it didn't  attract any more new applications.  The only new application that I remember on Leo 2 was the payroll for Grangemouth Steelworks.

INT: Tell me, what was your impression when you moved from Leo 1 to Leo 2?

MB: It just seemed a natural move.  The machine itself, everything about it was quicker.  The racks looked very similar, the computer racks.  The mercury delay tubes were much shorter, and therefore occupied less space.  All of the peripherals were twice the speed basically of the Leo 1 peripherals, except  the printers, they were still 60 lines a minute.  Everything was quicker.  The operating area was more compact, as was the back office area where the job assembly  work was done, and it was a very small data prep area, because most of the data prep was  still done across the road in WX Block.

INT: Did you get a feeling, perhaps of excitement, moving to Leo 2?

MB: I wouldn't call it excitement, because I just thoroughly enjoyed it.  I was on a shift with Ian Macmillan, and it was hectic in a different way.  We had outside applications, mostly on Leo 2.  We had the Kodak payroll and various others.  We used to share the tea shop ordering, if Leo 1 was down, tea shop ordering was very  time critical.  The orders came in, in the afternoon, and the job had to be finished by late afternoon so  that the bakery knew what to cook and what to pack.  The orders that came in, in the afternoon, went out the following morning, so it was still  the same sort of time pressure for getting jobs up and running, and basically every second  still counted.

INT: Did you get a pay rise when you moved?

MB: That was the nice thing about Lyons.  I used to get a pay rise every three months.

INT: Wow.

MB: I was never sure whether it was because of my age, so they were sort of growing my salary  in increments, or whether I was progressing. I never thought to ask.  I just accepted the  fact that I was getting more money every three months. Not a great amount, but in those days  it was a noticeable amount.

INT: And how long were you on Leo 2?

MB: Right, Leo 2.  I went to Leo 2 in 1961, and I moved across to Lyons in 1960.   1964, I moved across to Lyons when we were given the option either to stay with Lyons  or become Lyons employees, or to stay with Leo and remain as Leo employees.  This was around the time of the English Electric mergers, I think.

INT Right, well, before we go to that, just tell me a bit more about your time on Leo 2, a  much faster machine, possibly more compact.  Were you learning more about computers?  Were you getting a feel for how the whole thing worked?

MB: I had already got that feel, as far as the Leo 1s and Leo 2s were concerned, with the  architecture and everything else, that was fairly well impressed upon me by then.

INT: What about the hierarchy, did you feel that there was, were operators viewed differently  to programmers by the management, as it were, or how did it work?

MB: Again, there were no programmers there, so we didn't really come into contact, close  contact with programmers at all.  Lyons didn't have a programming office until the Leo 3s came along, so we really were not  related to the programmers at all.  The movement of people was quite quick.  Bill McMillan left and went to Hartree House fairly soon after I moved over. So I was only  on Ian's shift for probably about six to nine months. And I took over as shift leader when  he became the chief operator following after his brother.  And then Ian left ..., not sure how long after that, and I became chief operator.  I became chief operator in 1963.

INT: This is still within Leo Computers?

MB: Leo, Lyons.

INT: Yes.

MB: Yes.  You were still an employee of the computer company rather than Lyons directly.  Yes, I was still an employee of Leo.

INT: So just looking perhaps anecdotally at your time on Leo 2, were there any alarms, were  there any events that you particularly remember?

MB: One I do remember on a night shift with Ian and the rest of the shift, we were merrily  working away, and then all of a sudden we spotted a rabbit in the corridor. And, bearing  in mind we were on the second floor of WX Block, that wasn't something one normally expected  to see. And on investigation, we found that it belonged to a tramp who was sleeping in  the tray wash area, which was on the ground floor next to WX Block. Nice and warm in there.  To see this rabbit hopping along made you wonder whether or not you were seeing things.

INT: What happened to the tramp?

MB: I never knew. [inaudible].  Another thing that springs to mind while I was on Ian's shift. He used to have a motorbike  and sidecar that he used to go to and from work. And he then bought a Renault Dauphine [car],  which had an engine at the back. And one morning after the night shift he offered to give me  a lift home because we'd finished early. And we were going around the very bendy bits near  Biggin Hill, and he lost the back and we spun and went through the hedge backwards. And  in those days before the advent of mobile phones, etc, we had to wait for a passer-by  to come along before we could sort out getting pulled out.

INT: You weren't injured?

MB: No, no, we were fine.

INT: Just to get back to Leo 2, the data input would be on punch card and tape still?

MB: Leo 2, the architecture was identical to Leo 1 in terms of punch cards in and out and paper  tape.  The only difference being that the paper tape was seven-hole tape while the Leo 1 was five-hole  tape.

INT: What's the significance of that?

MB: Going back to Leo 1 for a moment, they were single filament car bulbs, car headlamp bulbs,  which were actually the same as the ones that I had in my then car, a 1937 Rover 14. And  one night we had to pinch one of my headlamp bulbs to put in the tape deck because the  lights had failed and they didn't have any spares.

INT: I'd like to talk about your move to Lyons and perhaps a bit about your own life, your  personal life, while we're going on.  I suggest we stop recording for the moment because I'll have to send you a new invitation  on Zoom [internet-based video system which became popular during Covid-19 in 2020-2021]. So I'll stop it now. 
 
Interview with Martin Booth (Part 2) by David Phillips. 

Transcribed and edited by Jon Hales

INT: Right Martin, back again, and would you mind telling us a bit about your personal life at this time?

MB: While I was on Leo 2, after I became Chief Operator, I was taken ill with polyneuritis in August 1962, which at that time, described as polyneuritis at that time, which had similar characteristics to polio. I spent five months in hospital and I left hospital finally with my left leg paralysed, half my torso paralysed, and very weak in the other limbs. In fact, this all happened a week before I was due to be married. I ended up by having a stag night on the ward with the nurses and the other people in the hospital and went to the church from the hospital the following morning to get married. This was 1st of December 1962 and that year was one of the worst winters in recent memory and I ended up by getting snowed-in in Biggin Hill until about the end of January. But then I was given an invalid carriage, a three-wheeled invalid carriage, and I used to then go to Hammersmith, to and from, in my invalid carriage.

INT: It was motorised?

MB: Yeah, oh yes, it had a two-stroke motorbike engine in it, oh yes. No no no no, it was enclosed, you don't see them on the roads anymore. And that was, that happened to me while I was still on Leo 2 and Lyons was a very good employer, they looked after me very well, in fact so well, after I first joined Leo 1, a few weeks after that I had toothache, I went to the dentist, they took out five teeth and measured me for a denture, then sent me back to work. But Lyons were an exceptionally good employer, they gave me full pay while I was away, and not long after I returned, they gave me an interest-free loan to buy a Mini, which made life much easier.

INT: You could drive a Mini? 

MB: Yes, I'd had a car since I was 17, so I had a driving licence. It was adapted for hand controls, the Mini, so I had to take another test after that, but that really wasn't an issue.

INT: If you won't mind me asking, how were you able to get around Leo 2, presumably in a wheelchair?

MB: Yes, well as I wasn't on the operating floor anymore, that didn't really make any difference. I was able to, I wasn't confined to the wheelchair, I left my wheelchair at the office because it was more convenient to sit in that and wheel around doing the odd things there, and going to and fro, rather than trying to walk. I could walk with two sticks, I had a calliper, I still have a calliper on my left leg, but not any great distance.

INT: Was your wife working? May I ask about your wife, was she working?

MB: No, my wife didn't work in those days. It's up to the man to bring in the money. So we had a flat in Shortlands, [inaudible 'in Bromley'?], and it worked out well. And that was while I was still Chief Operator, and after Norman Beasley moved over to [Leo] 3-7 in the Alliance [Insurance], I took over the Chief Operatorship of Leo 1 as well, because Leo 1 was at that time now starting to run down.

INT: And were you there when it was switched off?

MB: Yes, indeed, yeah.

INT: Tell me about that?

MB: Oh, we had a little celebration on the other machine, turned it off for the last time. Peter Bird, who was the Operations Manager on Leo 3. He had arranged for six of the printer throw-wheels to be encased in, not plastic, but sort of entombed, and I got presented with one of those. I also managed to acquire two of the Mercury Delay Tubes, not the six foot ones, but the 18 inch ones as souvenirs. It was quite emotional. And of course, I was still around, but not on it when Leo 2 shut down as well.

INT: What happened to them?

MB: Bits of them went to the Science Museum. The operating console from Leo 2 went to the Science Museum, and I believe it's still there. But other than that, I really don't know. I don't remember.

INT: What happened to you when these two machines were closed down? You were out of a job?

MB: By then, no, by then I was with Lyons as a programmer on Leo 3 programming. I moved over to Lyons in 1964?

INT: That was at the time of the merger with English Electric Computers?

MB: It was about that time. I don't remember exactly when, but it was about that time.

INT: Can you tell us a bit about the impact of that merger when you heard about it and what it meant to you and what happened? What changes you saw?

MB: Didn't really make much difference to me. I had always viewed myself as being a Lyons-Leo person as opposed to a Leo-Leo person. Because that was where I worked and they were the people I knew and it was those applications that I had an affinity for. So, it was a natural decision to stay with Lyons. There was no question of it.

INT: But you were with Leo still at the time of the takeover, the merger, shall we say. Did anything happen? Did anything change? Did you see new people, new procedures in any way?

MB: Nothing at all. Leo 2 was really a Lyons machine rather than a Leo machine and [I] very rarely saw anyone from Hartree House or had any dealings with Hartree House.

INT: So you moved, you became an employee of Lyons rather than of the new venture that had been set up.
 Correct.

INT: But you were still on the same machine?

MB: Yep.

INT: Or did Lyons take delivery of another machine?

MB: They took delivery of Leo 3-7 in I think it was 1962 or 63. One of the early ones. No, it was 1962 that Hartree House took delivery of [Leo] 3-1, the first one, which was why there was suddenly a great movement of people onto the Hartree House systems.
INT: But not you?

MB: 1964 was when [Leo] 3-7 went into Lyons. It might have been 63, but it was around then. But it was around the time that I moved over shortly before I moved over onto the programming side at Lyons.

INT: Did you not ever operate a Leo 3?

MB: No, no, no. I never had any operational dealings with it.

INT: So you moved to Lyons, but not as an operator, but as a programmer, did you say?

MB: Yep. I'd done some machine code programming while I was still on Leo 2, adapting the remaining programs from Leo 1 to run on Leo 2, the ones that couldn't be run on Leo 2. Things like the payroll and the tea shops ordering, they could always be run on Leo 2 because one needed to be the backup for the other. And likewise the bakery rounds. For the other less frequent applications on Leo 1, I converted those to run on Leo 2. And ... I don't know, I suppose I went to the trainee program, but it never seemed like that because the moment I got there, my task was to write new payroll programs for the five different Lyons payrolls. Because of my association with running the payrolls over the years, I was very familiar with the characteristics of the different payrolls. So it seemed a natural thing to do.

INT: On a [Leo] 3?

MB: Yeah, on Leo 3. We were programming in CLEO, 'Clear Language for Expression of Orders', it stands for ...[...]. And I was on Des Stoddard's team. In those days, the systems analysts worked within the Lyons central office. And there was an analyst for each of the operational divisions. And Des was the analyst for the accounting division. And so I was on his team writing the payrolls. And that was good fun. And as I say, it was in CLEO. And the Lyons, Leo 3, had a 'Lector' document reader, which I can't remember, but I think it was created by Leo [company]. And that read hand coded documents where you marked a cross to fill in the boxes. And all of the payroll data was converted to use those documents as input, rather than [...].
INT: One sheet at a time?

MB: There were three people per sheet. It was an automated feed, like photocopiers, where it took a sheet at a time. So payroll was my forte. And I quite enjoyed that. In fact, I was working on the payroll programs when decimalization came along. And I suddenly got a call for jury service just about the time when decimalization was to be implemented. And 'Inky' Collins, who was the manager of the accounts division, he pulled strings somewhere and got me off. He said that the potential running of Lyons depended upon my presence in case the payrolls didn't work. So I don't know whether I'm glad or not.

INT: Did you ever do the duty?

MB: Pardon?

MB: INT: Did you ever do jury duty?

MB: No.

INT: How did you find programming?

MB: I loved it. That really has always been my one love, as you'll discover when we go through my later life. Programming was my forte. Programming was my love. And I really got on with it very well.

INT: Did you have a team working with you?

MB: No. I wrote the payrolls myself. And there was one other on Dez's team, Graham ... something. And he was working on different applications. So payroll was my baby because there was the belief that I could just sit down and write them without some ..., they were written in the image of the Leo 2 payrolls, Leo 1, Leo 2 payrolls with the same style of output, functionality,... [a] difference being the lector input, the document input, rather than paper tape. So I just got down and wrote them.

INT: How long were you doing this?

MB: I became chief programmer in 1969. I took over from Paul Hover, who moved on, as chief programmer. By that time, the analysts were out in the divisions, working in the divisions, for the divisions. And it was only programming teams that were left in the centre. I became chief programmer in 1969, looking after and maintaining the different teams who were contracted to the different divisions.

INT: That's quite a meteoric rise, really, isn't it? Because you'd only been there ...

MB: Everything was in Leo in those days, in Lyons. Yes. Well, I say meteoric, I'd like to believe that it was because I I merited it.

INT: Of course, the opportunities came along. That was the big difference.
 Because people moved on, and things changed, and computing got more and more understood. Then, yes, I was fortunate to be in the beginning, almost, and benefited from it.

INT: You feel, do you still sense that, that you were in at the beginning?

MB: Oh, yes. Very much so. Yes. It gave you an understanding of how computers worked internally. And it's surprising how similar computing today is to then. Apart from size and speed, the logic is very similar.

INT: Tell me, I'm not sure if you have family at this point.
 Yes, I got married in 1962, a daughter in 1965, and a son in 1967. So I was living in Biggin Hill and commuting each day with a young family. And it was that really, as you'll see in a minute, which prompted me to eventually leave Lyons ... for one of the reasons. I was Chief Operator during the ... not Chief Operator, Chief Programmer, during the time that Lyons installed the [Leo] 346. The [Leo] 346 had a Xeronic printer, like an overgrown photocopier, with a furnace to dry the documents. And it caught fire one night, and the computer was not completely destroyed, but the smoke contaminated everything.

INT: This was in, within Cadby Hall?

MB: Yes. Well, WX-Block. No. Elms House is in the same building as Leo 2 in Elms House across the road in Brook Green. And it caught fire. 
Caught fire. 
Yeah. It had a paper jam and the furnace, which was drying the paper, drying the ink, just caught the paper and everything went up. Not good.
INT: What happened? They had to replace the whole?

MB: They had to go through and clean everything and recommission everything and replace things that had been burned. They didn't install another Xeronic printer. And then the Leo connection with Lyons started to disappear ... in the mid 60s, late 60s, early 70s, mid 60s, late 60s, early 70s. 
There was a study done about the next computer. Alan King was leading the study. And we looked at, they looked at four different manufacturers, IBM, ICL, and ... which was, English Electorate had become ICL, and NCR, and I can't remember the other one. But evaluated the computers that were on offer and the languages that would run on them and eventually plumped for IBM. And ... partly because they saw that PL1 was going to be the language of the future.

INT: Were you instrumental in that decision?

MB: No, I contributed information towards it, but I didn't, I was no part of the decision. So we went IBM, first with an IBM 360/50 and PL1 started to become the language rather than CLEO. And the IBM 360 rapidly became the 370 because IBM is an expert at encouraging people to grow.

INT: How did you find dealing with IBM people rather than say the Leo management that you've been used to?

MB: I had a lot more contact with IBM people than I did with the ... , with the Leo and English Electric people. I became the IBM regional correspondent for the UK for a year, which involved going to four meetings a year. I remember one was in Zurich, one was in Madrid, ... one was in Copenhagen, and I can't remember where the other one was, but that was good fun.

INT: What was the purpose of the meeting?

MB: There were user group meetings. So each major IBM user had a member on that group and they were conferences really to explore the upcoming options. Databases were starting to become talked about and implemented. Kodak was a great leader in the advent of databases on the IBMs. So I certainly had a lot more contact with IBM in those days. I went on a couple of trips with IBM in their own plane with Norman and Alan King and Peter Bird. We went to Montpellier to look at the facilities that IBM had there. We went to Rome to look at the facilities they had there. This was prior to deciding to go IBM. [Ironic comment:] So, there was no coercion at all. But no, I had a lot more to do with them as a manufacturer than I ever did with then with Leo.

INT: How long were you with Lyons then in your new role?

MB: Well, 1972, I was co-opted to run a team selling surplus capacity on the [IBM] 370 to the outside world. And after a very short while, I concluded that really I had hit the ceiling in Lyons. There was no way that I was going to progress any further up the chain in Lyons. I was only 35, 36. And I could see that my future was really away from Lyons. They were already starting to talk about decentralizing and moving out of Cadby Hall. And that was always going to be to the north. And being from the south, I didn't want to move. If I was going to move, I didn't want to move north of London. So while I was doing that, while I was contemplating that, because my family, the children were still young, so if we were going to move then that was going to be a good time to do it. I was approached by Leasco Software in Knightsbridge to join them as a principal consultant. So, that is what I did. In 1973, I joined Leasco at Knightsbridge and did three, four projects for public companies. And I quite enjoyed that. But equally, it just confirmed my belief of what consultants are. They pick the brains of the company employees, reword it, and document it as if it was new thought. And the important thing with a consultant is, as soon as you're on a consultancy assignment, it was to make a good case for bringing more consultants in. So that wasn't the world for me.

INT: But what was it consulting on? It was advising people on computers, how to use computers?

MB: I contributed to a manual for one of the government departments, I can't remember which one, on data input for computers. Because my involvement with the ... Lector, and on the IBM we had a document reader, I contributed on that front. I did a study for a company in Horsforth, Sandals Pharmaceuticals, where I spent six months with a colleague, ... no four months with a colleague up there, going through their computer operation and documented what would need to be done to move their computer software, etc, onto a new computer. And that was quite good. It was interesting. It was detailed. I did that. Then I did a study for a shoe company in, oh ..., begins with an N, not Nottingham. Anyway, for a shoe company in the town which is famous for making shoes, so famous I can't remember its name [Northampton]. And I had to study the ways of making shoes and improving the way of doing it in order to economise on the manufacturing process. That was quite interesting. But none of it really excited me. And all the time I was there, I was still looking for an opportunity to the south. And that finally came along in 1974, when I was offered the job as data processing manager at Gross Cash Registers in Brighton. And that appealed to me greatly, because my brief there was to create the software to run a bureau to process the cassettes, which were being recorded by their new range of electromechanical tills.
INT: Can you just tell me the name of the company again?

MB: Gross Cash Registers, G-R-O-S-S.

INT: Thank you.

MB: And that was great. I thoroughly enjoyed that. I had a small team, three programmers, and it was five data prep ladies. And they already had an existing activity doing in-house processing for the ... for the factory on an ICL computer. And I designed the software to provide the bureau services, and it was written in COBOL. And that was some that was duly implemented. And we had quite a good time. And it's only ..., when I joined Gross, we very quickly moved down to Burgess Hill, which is near Brighton, which is where I still live. And it was nice. It suited me, it suited the family. The children were still young, they went to the local primary school, and everything moved on from there.

INT: Do you feel that you were part of a fairly unique group of people who actually understood computers and can work with them? At that time, you were still a relatively small cohort of people, I would have thought.

MB: I think the answer ..., I think the answer there has to be yes. I certainly didn't think it in any sort of egotistical way. But I certainly had an appreciation that I was in ... on the ground floor of computing, purely by chance, purely by accident. I had never heard of a computer. And it gave me opportunities that I think would never have existed otherwise, to progress rapidly at such a young age. Because when I moved to Gross, which was ... the back end of 1974. No, early 74. Very early 74. [...] I forgot what I was saying now.

INT: I was asking you about whether you felt part of a unique group who knew something about computers.

MB: Yes. I was very much aware that I had learned an awful lot with Lyons. And I was grateful for it. And yes, I mean, computing really was still in its infancy at that time. Mini  computers had arrived, but PCs hadn't been [inaudible] bought.

INT: So what happened next? How long was it at Gross?

MB: Gross got bought by Chubb in 1977. Gross was starting to find that they were suffering fierce competition from purely electronic tools which are being produced by the likes of Casio, etc. Whereas the Gross ones were still heavily mechanical with electronic components. Gross did all of the manufacturing at Brighton. They made their own circuit boards. But they were starting to struggle for market share. So they sold themselves to Chubb. Chubb shut down the computer department. And the computing activity, the bureau activity, was moved to a company called Scan Data Centres in Haywards Heath. So all of the processing went there. And I went with it as the general manager of Scan Data Centres. That was in 1977. So again, things were moving quite quickly. It's only three years since I joined Gross and then suddenly I was running a company. Still quite quickly, 1980, Scan Data Centres was sold to Jackson Associates in Chichester. And, that didn't appeal to me at all. I didn't like the people there. Again, it was a question of the work was going to be moved to the computers in Chichester eventually and the Haywards Heath Bureau would be shut down. So I left them in 1980 and set up my own company, 'Channel Business Systems'.

INT: Why do you call it that?

MB: I stuck pins in a map. I thought 'something business systems', was going to sound good. So the pin went into the forest. And I thought, no, I don't like 'forest business systems'. Then I missed England altogether and hit the channel. And I thought, well, that sounds all right. So 'Channel Business Systems Ltd'. was what it became. And I started off by myself. Then two of my Scan Data colleagues joined me several months later. So there was the three of us operating as 'Channel Business Systems'.

INT: Doing what, as a consultancy?

MB: No. Our aim was to provide affordable computers for retail customers. That was our project aim. Our first project, which I wrote the software for, was [for] a nine-inch PET. PET computers were just about starting, or Commodore computers, rather. A nine-inch PET sitting on a till drop with a 40-column printer and a keyboard configured to behave like a till. And we sold several of those. It was quite successful. And then very quickly after that, when the larger screen PET came along, we made a circuit board to link to OMRON cash registers. Because OMRON cash registers were able to export data onto cassettes or across a link.

INT: Is this company still going?

MB: OMRON? No. I think it's still going in Japan as a Japanese company. But it doesn't operate under that name in the UK anymore. The name that still exists in the UK [is] for blood pressure readers and things like that. But they don't do tills anymore.

INT: I was thinking of your company.

MB: My company? No. We grew and grew with the advent of PCs. And then certainly once the hard disk PC came in; 5K hard disk, would you believe? We rewrote the software. We rewrote the software and expanded the software using Ryan McFarlane COBOL for PCs. And we carried on linking with tills. But we also developed software ... I developed the software to run ... the till software to run on the computer under COBOL. And we started off quite well. We ended up by having our own software which covered all of the aspects of retail stock management for single shops and multiple shops and accounting. We avoided payroll like the plague because we thought other people could do that much better than we ever could.

INT: That was your old speciality.

MB: Oh, yes. But by the time we set up Channel Business Systems, tills was my speciality. Because of my time with Gross, being involved with their tills, the way the tills function, the characteristics of the keyboards, capture of data to cassettes and processing that to provide meaningful stock management information. That was where we were at by then. And we had quite a number of notable customers over the years. People like Kodak who bought a branded version of the software to sell to their retail customers. Channel Island Co-op with 13 food stores and one department store. Royals of Wroxham which was, they almost owned Wroxham out near Norwich with a huge supermarket and department stores.
INT: May I ask, did you employ any ex-Leo people?

MB: Ex?

MB: INT: Leo people.
 No.
INT: Any of your old colleagues?

MB: No. No. No. There were none around by that time.

INT: Did you have any further contact with Leo?

MB: I'll come on to that. That's further down your list. Carrying on the customers, we had our tills in 600 Mr. Minute branches. Lots of the Shiner & Glass Federation members installed the system. 35 Toymaster members ... installed the system. We had a dealer in Hong Kong, BHS in Gibraltar and the duty-free area in Orlando. So we were quite well respected and well regarded with what I would like to believe was a quality system, but we were still a small company. That made a lot of people nervous about committing their computing activity and their till activity to a small company. And, the bigger boys were starting to get keen and being involved with the larger organizations. They of course could undercut us .... We used to sell the hardware, the tills and the computers as well as the software. We really needed the margin out of the tills to be able to operate profitably. We sold all around the country. Then in 1997, we sold ourselves to Retail Business Solutions in Milton Keynes. The decision to sell was largely my idea because I wanted to retire when I was 60, which would have been 2001, ... to enjoy a long and happy retirement. But unfortunately, my wife died in 1998. So I left RBS in 2001 when they decided to shut down the offices in Burgess Hill and moved the whole operation to Milton Keynes.

INT: You were still a relatively young man.

MB: I was, thank you.

INT: What were you going to do with your spare time?

MB: Well, I didn't want to get back into the situation of employing people and all of the responsibilities that that entailed. So I sat down and wrote some till software specifically for Windows. So it was Windows-driven, complete Windows operation for PC-based tills, which were quite common in those days. I wrote the software and then joined up with a company called Data Sim in Portsmouth, who had back office software, head office software, communications, et cetera. They were the main software supplier to the TEC, T-E-C, till company, to the dealers of the till company. So they had customers all around the country, dealers all around the country, rather, who handled their software to front-end the tills that they were selling. And they wanted to get into computerized 'PRS' software, which they didn't have. Theirs was purely processing the cassettes, which were stylized. So they wanted software to run on the new TEC tills, which were PC-based tills. So I called myself MCB Pos Software. That's MCB Pos Software Limited [POS: Point of Sale]. No, sorry, not limited. A sole trader. So that's what I traded on that. That was in 2001. Joined forces with them [Data Sim], and the world has been very comfortable since then. Their back office software is mainly aimed at small retailers or multiples with single till shops, which is not a market that the big boys normally go for. So the dealers around the country, they would supply the complete system, including the software. The dealers would support the customers from a hardware point of view. DataSim in Portsmouth provide hotline support to ... direct to the end user. And I provided DataSim with software upgrades, implementing new features that customers asked for, any legislation changes, new hardware variants as they came along. And I didn't have to go out of the house. So that suited me fine, because by then, my illness was starting to catch up with me again. And I now have what's called post-polio syndrome, where the muscles are wasting. And there's nothing you can do about it.

INT: It hasn't affected your memory in any way?

MB: Oh, Northampton. That was the one.

INT: Well done. 

MB: That was the shoe town. I was trying to. Well, I worry sometimes when I don't remember things like that.

INT: No, you'd be very impressive so far.

MB: But generally, no, no, no problem.

INT: [...] about your children. Have they gone into computers?

MB: No, no. No, I have my daughter lives in France now, with my granddaughter who's at university. My son and his wife live in Burgess Hill here. My daughter runs her own dog grooming business from one of my units outside. And my son works for Southern Water. 
But computers isn't today. Computer programming is nothing like it was before, it used to be. All of my tool software has been written in COBOL. So I haven't had to resort to any other of the new languages that come along or the new features that come along. And over the years, 4,210 tills have been installed with my software on. And they all had, or they used to have initially, annual support licenses, which was nice. The software stabilized really, I suppose, about two, three years ago. And ... it now isn't being actively sold. But some of the customers, we had Costa Coffee, about 800 of their franchise users used the software. And some of those were in Spain and Gibraltar. And then places like Blarney Castle, the Mint, and Fine Food installations. But retail has changed. Costa, they were bought out by Coca-Cola a couple of years back. And they don't run my software anymore. And in the last year, the number of support agreements has declined noticeably. And in fact, it's now down to 389 as of today. But it's run its course. It's done well. And I thoroughly enjoyed it.

INT: Very good. All from the launchpad of Leo.

MB: I have fond memories of Leo and Lyons. Very fond memories of the place, the people, the company, everything.

INT: Are you a member of the Lyons, or the Leo, should I say, group?

MB: No, I went to one of their meetings and discovered I didn't know anyone there.

INT: Really?

MB: Because I was never really part of the real Leo. But several years ago, Peter Bird set up a twice a year meeting of people from Lyons Leo. And we met, as I say, twice a year. People like Norman Beasley, Alan King went. But sadly, with the declining numbers, at the last meeting, we were down to about eight of us. I'm the last one with any Leo One connections. And for the last year, we haven't been able to meet anyway [This was a result of restrictions in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic]. And I'm not sure when we will be able to again.

INT: Did you join any of the associations linked to computers, the British Computing Society, for instance?

MB: I did briefly when I was at Lyons, but that bored me. As I say, programming was my love, and still is. My development system is here. I've got a till here, which I use for testing. And to the finer points of computing. And, I was never taken up with the need to sit and talk about grand activities.

INT: Well, listen, this has been a fascinating conversation. Your memory is remarkable, and I'm grateful for that. But I think we've now really covered everything, a very, very interesting period.

 I think you have, I bared my soul. 

INT: You bared your soul, and we've recorded it. You'll see us in due course.

 I just have to read something to wrap up with, if you don't mind, Martin, which says: 

"This interview with Martin Booth has been recorded by the Leo Computer Society, and the society would like to thank him very much for his time and reminiscences. The interview and the transcript form part of an oral history project to document the early use of electronic computers in business and other applications, but particularly in business. Any opinions expressed are those of the interviewee, Martin, and not the Society. The copyright of this interview [is recorded] in its recorded form and in transcript remains the property of Leo Computer Society 2021".

INT: So thank you very much for your time. 

MB: It's been great. I've enjoyed it. Thanks, David.

INT: Carry on. Just let me stop that [recording ends].  

Provenance :
Transferred from Frank Land's Dropbox to Lisa McGerty

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