LEO the electronic clerk takes over – archive, 27 September 1954
27 September 1954: The age of a clerical army engaged in a welter of repetitive calculation is over and done with
When Lyons Electronic Office ("Leo" for short) came into regular operation at the beginning of this year, it marked a new era in clerical functions. The age of a clerical army engaged in a welter of repetitive calculation was over and done with. The new age sees that same clerical army engaged not in mathematical drudgery but in the more interesting and stimulating work of interpreting figures rather than merely producing them. The effect in a large business is immediate and widespread. No longer does management need to conduct its high level operations as the result of history and hunches. "Leo" provides, almost for the asking, up-to-the-minute figures of sales, stocks, and production and all those various "breakdowns" and analyses which were previously impossible owing to the time and labour involved in their preparation.
Basically "Leo" is what is popularly known as an "electronic brain" - known to the technicians, who rather boggle at these popular phraseologies, as a "high-speed automatic computer." But "Leo" does not stop here. The electronic brain, as is generally known now, is capable of performing the most abstruse calculation in the minutest fraction of the time taken by normal human methods. If, however, an electronic brain is to be harnessed for regular commercial use, time becomes an all-important factor. The scientist is only interested in the solution to an intricate mathematical problem and the time taken in feeding the information into the "brain" and the subsequent time taken in recording the solution provided is of no real significance to him. In large-scale repetitive calculation, however, it is of little use having a high-speed computer if the time taken in feeding in the necessary information and the time taken in recording the results is out of all proportion to the time taken by the machine to perform the calculation.