Happy Birthday!
This week marks the 50th birthday of business computing. The first business computer was built by the UK's Lyons catering chain. It took them four years to build and went live in 1951.To give US readers, who probably haven't heard of Lyons, some idea, this is roughly the same in contemporary terms as Taco Bell announcing a new generation of microprocessors! The computer was called Lyons Electronic Office - LEO for short and used 9,000 valves which had to be replaced on a rolling program. But, "Hold on", do I hear the history buffs say? "What about ENIAC - that was around in 1947, crunching numbers for the US military". Yes it was indeed, but it wasn't doing business work. And not only was it not doing business work, but the idea of using computers for business had never even been considered. At that time the perceived wisdom was that computers would only be used by wealthy government agencies - the military for calculating ballistics tables, the Bureau of Census to process data and so on. Indeed there was a lot of debate about whether it was economically viable to produce computers. One influential report produced at the time calculated that there was a world wide demand for only six computers! Once Lyons had shown that you could use computers for business applications - they were using it for payrolls and handling the paperwork associated with running a far flung empire of corner coffee houses and bigger restaurants - other companies began to take note. These companies, like the Ford Motor Co, began to hire time on the machine to do their own payrolls. Thus began the inexorable rise of business computing. As an aside, it is perhaps worth mentioning that one of the results of this early introduction of computers was the wiping out of a job that younger readers will never even have heard of - the comptometer operator. The comptometer was a mechanical adding machine, and big companies had whole floors of offices with these machines, usually operated by young women. They did all the calculations for payroll, for invoicing customers, and for checking incoming invoices. The comptometer pool was presided over by a queen dragon whose job it was not only to supervise the operators, but to make sure that their morals were not compromised by young men from the other departments! By the beginning of the 1970s the job had ceased to exist, and even the word comptometer began to die out of the vocabulary... From Winding Down Newsletter, 14th October, 2001. |
If you have any questions or comments about the articles on my web site, click here to send me email. |