Thank you for this. There's also an excellent book that I read a few years ago, titled... 'A Computer Called LEO' by Georgina Ferry. After university, in the early 1970's, I joined the MOD and did military computing. After a couple of years of that, I took a job with ICL, one of the successor companies to Leo Computers. Something that isn't mentioned too much when reviewing the history of computers is the sheer noise levels in the computer rooms of those days..., air cons, the mainframe computer itself, the crash of line/chain printers, tape drives, teletypewriter for the operator's console. ICL had it's HQ in Bracknell, Berkshire at the time. A multistory building, the whole ground floor was a massive computer hall, essentially a hangar filled with mainframe computers. I was based in Reading with the software division, ICL Dataskil, and would visit Bracknell regularly to do program testing for compatability with different machines. The roar and general noise was incredible.
Really I can’t praise this enough! A 30 minute documentary that’s like classic technology coverage from the 80s and 90s…. Tomorrow’s World and Equinox. I hope we can see more
This is wonderful! My ancestors founded Lyons and hearing about LEO from some of the people who worked on it is brilliant. My father worked for Lyons when he left school but eventually moved from London to Liverpool and joined another family business which was selling jewellery. I vividly remember visiting the head offices as a small child and being entranced by the computers there which were a major part of the business because of the lessons learn by how successfully Lyons had used computers. Thank you to everyone involved in making this video.
I was an Intercode programmer on the Leo III computer at HM Customs and Excise, Southend, in 1966-67. It's really fascinating to see this documentary - quite moving really, as these men and women were true pioneers of the Computer Age.
A fascinating documentary and well produced. I worked as an operator on Mancester City Council's Leo III from 1968 to 1972 when we switched to English Electric System IV. We were very aware that Manchester was in the forefront of business computing in those days.
interesting to know that LEO III worked until 1981, in 1983 I bought my first home computer, Atari 800 with 48k bytes of ram, had a lot of fun programming in BASIC language and playing games in a very small computer with floppy disk storage. some of my friends used the Commodore 64, also a good home computer.
I'm really looking forward to this one :-) Also, it's a spooky coincedence that when I hit this page there had been 42 likes already? How many roads must a man walk down? Sorry if that's too geeky for some ;-)
Beautifully done. Computer history needs to take better account of LEO's pioneering contributions in hardware, software, and systems engineering. Thank you!
An excellent account of the early days of computing! A great "behind the scenes" story of LEO. This is a very valuable piece of computer history! Thank you for sharing this. ~ Mark G., CHAP
Fantastic film! I had the luck to be taught by Frank Land and Sam Waters (also ex-LEO) at the LSE in 1977/78 on his Systems Analysis course. At this time almost all other computing courses were based on scientific uses of computers.
LEO is perhaps the most impressive use of early computera, that I've ever heard about. It is not hot like number crunching and modelling. But it took on a huge job of moving things around - and did it well. With mercury delay lines.
Interesting the aptitude test being to make a cup of tea, the test I took was to get dressed in the morning for work. Think about it, how many people left for work without opening the front door.
I was initially confused what Lyons was referring to, as a lot of places have a Lions Club and I thought it was that: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions_Clubs_International
