07/07/08 :: [SOA] Pioneer of Computer Business Analysis Dies [permalink]
I caught this news while I was on vacation reading the paper. I felt sorry for David Caminer
... who as an employee of a legendary chain of British tea shops found the earliest ways to use a computer for business purposes, including standardizing flavorful, cost-effective cups of tea.
Lyons was the first company in the world to computerize its commercial operations, partly because it had so many of them: It had more than 200 teahouses in London and its suburbs, with each Lyons Corner House daily generating thousands of paper receipts and needing scores of fresh-baked items.
The result was LEO, its name derived from Lyons Electronic Office. The Economist magazine called it "the first dedicated business machine to operate on the 'stored program principle,' meaning that it could be quickly reconfigured to perform different tasks by loading a new program."
"LEO's early success owed less to its hardware than to its highly innovative systems-oriented approach to programming, devised and led by David Caminer," Computer Weekly said last year.
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 IBM and the other computer giants that eventually overtook it.
The finished LEO, which had less than 100,000th the power of a current PC, could calculate an employee's pay in 1.5 seconds, a job that took an experienced clerk eight minutes.
Sadly, as I mentioned in previous posts, computers were first used to compute, we never really left this legacy behind. Storage came as an "add-on", a value-add to computing. In 2008 we are still in the "Programming Technology" era, nothing has really changed, except for "more cycles, users, bandwidth and bytes". Nobody has ever designed an "Information System". I bet that most of the programming concepts in use today can be traced back to David's work.