On Wednesday 14 July Neville Lyons talked to the Association by Zoom
on
the Lyons Tea Shops Company`s far sighted recognition of the need to
automate their essential business processes such as stock control and
pay-roll as a way to manage costs and provide scope for expansion. LEO
(Lyons Electronic Office), the world`s first business computer, was
designed and manufactured in-house by the catering company.
Neville served as a Regular Royal Signals Officer
for 31 years
followed by a second career as Executive of National and European
Electronics Trade Associations. One of his retirement occupations has
been researching his family history where he found proof of his
relationship to Sir Joseph Lyons co-founder of J Lyons & Co., the
giant catering company. Sir Joseph was a cousin to Neville`s
grandfather and this led him to deeper research into the company`s
history and the story of LEO.
Neville described the origins of the J Lyons
company, its famous Tea Shops and Corner House Restaurants (leading to
nostalgic memories by the Editor of treats as a schoolboy with his
parents - delicious lunches to the accompaniment of string quartets).
Large scale manufacture of ‘Swiss rolls’ and other catering products,
the setting up of tea and coffee divisions and so on, established the
need for a system to manage this now complex business. There were no
commercially available computers available for such a purpose so the
company set about doing it themselves by employing the best available
experts; the result was LEO.
Contact Richard Cannon for the private Members’ link
to the YouTube recording of this little known remarkable success story
of British pioneering in the world of business computing.