The Lyon That Roared

by Paul McGoldrick

My godmother was an unmarried aunt who was extraordinarily smart – with a first class honours degree in English and the scary ability to learn a new language every year – and reached a high level in the British Civil Service. But she was also an argumentative, selfish woman who thought, for example, that Christmas for her godson involved the purchase, every year, of a new pair of slippers. She would spitefully use the tip of her umbrella to create space on her standing-room only commuter train and accused one of my brothers of poisoning (with alcohol) her pet budgerigar (not an impossible theory, at all), and put herself in a pit of gloom when her last conversation with her mother – my paternal grandmother – was actually a full-face verbal fight.

But she was also a delightful woman in some respects; she regularly took me to Gilbert and Sullivan performances of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company at the Savoy with a dinner treat either before or after. How grown up I felt eating a gammon steak with a pineapple slice on top!

Many of those dinners were at that quintessential location of the day: a Lyons’ Corner House. Each had a number of restaurants above the food hall that was always on the ground floor. And each of the restaurants had a distinctive menu and its own set of live musicians in an orchestra (a human variation of Muzak) with my favorite being where I could get an all-day fried breakfast with everything (eggs, bacon, sausages, black pudding, mushrooms, baked beans, and fried bread) cooked in the same skillet, which was also the delivery vehicle to the table. On one occasion I remember Aunt Kitty being handed a teacup that had a distinct lipstick mark on the side. The resulting shrill complaint was greeted with the response that “it has been sterilized, madam…”

The owners of these establishments, and some 250 white and gold fronted teashops (with ‘Nippy’ waitresses) on high streets throughout Britain, was J Lyons & Co, established in 1887. It became one of the largest catering and food manufacturing companies in the world with its food laboratories attracting leading Oxbridge scientists (including the to-be Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher) and catering such prestigious events as the Royal Garden Parties at Buckingham Palace and the Chelsea Flower Show. At one point the Corner Houses introduced an American style hamburger on the menu and that was spun out as the Wimpy chain of fast food outlets. They even bought, and built, hotels, as well as acquiring Baskin-Robbins and Dunkin Donuts.

Things went sour in 1974 when recession and interest rates sank their expansion plans, and by 1978 the company lost its independence when Allied Breweries bought it out and started to disassemble all the brands, although the Lyons name continued through 1997 – over one hundred years of trading.

In among all the firsts in catering were the first frozen foods in Europe but, most importantly, was LEO: Lyons’ Electronic Office.

LEO was the first real business computer in the world. It went on line sixty years ago in November 1951, crunching a program to track bread delivery to Lyons’ outlets across the UK. Shortly afterwards it was put to work on the massive Lyons’ payroll reducing the computational time involved per employee from tens of minutes down to seconds.

LEO would have happened earlier but for the short-sightedness (and fear of spying by the Soviet Union) decision by Winston Churchill to destroy all traces of Colossus, which was the smart logic and number machine (the ‘Turing’ machine) responsible for speeding up code breaking of the Tunny and Enigma machines at Bletchley Park during the war.

That decision was allegedly carried out, except that I remember seeing a Colossus, still operating, at GCHQ in Cheltenham in my teens… The Americans, it should be noted, proudly and openly displayed the artillery programming computer, ENIAC, in 1945, even though it was a number cruncher only and did not see actual war service.

LEO was designed without benefit of those war efforts and relied more on Sir Maurice Wilkes’ work at Cambridge in 1949 on his electronic delay storage automatic calculator (EDSAC) which was derived from Turing’s 1936 paper On Computational Numbers.  EDSAC was also influenced by EDVAC (electronic discrete variable automatic computer) created at the University of Pennsylvania in 1944. One of the EDVAC team, John von Neumann of Manhattan Project fame, who was not the leader, called the architecture his own in a paper that completely ignored his colleagues. He described a CPU for arithmetic and logic, instruction registers, local memory, and I/Os: the architecture of virtually every computer in existence up until today.

LEO used a very practical architecture but with the restrictions of 1940’s electronics and the need for something that is not required today – coping with pre-decimal pounds, shillings, and pence! Errors were called by the more honest name of ‘blunders’ rather than the transatlantic ‘bugs’ and a huge emphasis was placed on numerous I/Os with data validity checks and various print facilities. The central control panel had multiple oscilloscope-type displays for checking operations, and audio cues were available for trained operators to be able to listen to and identify specific buss operations.

The limits of the electronics available meant that the memory storage using mercury tubes was limited to the equivalent of what would now be less than 8 kbyte, with over 6000 tubes in operation for switching logic. The failure rate of 6-V filament tubes operating in close proximity was very high into the 1950s and LEO required about a 50% per year replacement rate.

The original LEO, later called LEO I, ran with modifications and updates through the end of 1964 and both LEO II and LEO III (fully transistorized) followed. The machine spawned its own computer company, LEO Computers Ltd, which, like many British technology inventions, faltered in its own success despite producing quasi-successful mainframes like the LEO 326. Coincidentally, that last LEO was killed off thirty years after Lyons turned on the first machine, in 1981, which was the same year that a company called IBM announced a product, the IBM5150, which was the first official IBM PC.

So happy birthday, LEO, and your half-spawn, the IBM PC. I would send slippers as a present but I know how that feels.