Tea Shop Business Computer Pioneer Passed Away
David Caminer, who helped develop the world's first business computer, passed away two weeks ago at age 92. What in the world does this have to do with food? As an employee of J. Lyons & Company, Caminer helped the famous British tea shop chain computerize its commercial operations for its over 200 teahouses in London with the LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) computer, which helped do things like standardize cost-effective cups of tea. In other words, a tea company developed their own hardware and software in 1951:
LEO performed its first calculation on Nov. 17, 1951, running a program to evaluate costs, prices and margins of that week’s baked output. At that moment, Lyons was years ahead of I.B.M. and the other computer giants that eventually overtook it.
"Americans can’t believe this," Paul Ceruzzi, a historian of computing and curator at the National Air and Space Museum, said in an interview last week. “They think you’re making it up. It really was true."
That a food conglomerate did this seems almost incredible. New Scientist said in 2001: "In today’s terms it would be like hearing that Pizza Hut had developed a new generation of microprocessor, or McDonald’s had invented the Internet."
