[Deathwatch] David Caminer, Pioneer in Computers, 92

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

June 29, 2008
David Caminer, a Pioneer in Computers, Dies at 92
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

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, died
June 19 in London. He was 92.

The death was announced by the Leo Computers Society, whose purpose is
to keep alive the memory of LEO, the computer Mr. Caminer helped
develop for J. Lyons & Company. It was the world?s first business
computer, a distinction certified by Guinness World Records.

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.

In addition to running the tea shops, Lyons catered large events like
tennis at Wimbledon and garden parties at Windsor Castle; it also
operated hotels, laundries, and ice cream, candy and meat pie
companies. And, of course, tea plantations.

As a result, the company required exceptionally efficient office
support. So it was only natural it would look at the ?electronic
brains? that scientists in the United States were developing for
scientific and military purposes as a way to streamline its own empire.
Mr. Caminer?s role was finding ways to retain traditional clerical
rigor while speeding up the company?s logistics and finances many times
over.

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 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.?

David Treisman was born on June 26, 1915, in the East End of London.
His father was killed in World War I, and his mother married Felix
Caminer. An avid leftist, he decided a university education was
irrelevant, obituaries in the London papers said. He joined Lyons as a
management trainee in 1936.

During World War II, he lost a leg in combat in Tunisia. He returned to
Lyons and soon became manager of the systems analysis office. Lyons
sent employees to the United States to study office automation, and
American experts said they should go to the University of Cambridge,
where Maurice Wilkes was developing an early computer.

Lyons made a deal to help finance Dr. Wilkes?s work in return for his
help in building a computer for the company. As work on the hardware
progressed, Mr. Caminer drew up a flow chart to show how the different
job requirements related. The charts became the basis of the computer
code.

Mr. Caminer has been called the first corporate electronic systems
analyst, a designation with which Mr. Ceruzzi agreed.

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. Its success led Lyons to set up a
computer subsidiary that later developed two more generations of LEO,
the last with transistors, rather than the noisy vacuum tubes used in
the first two models.

LEOs were sold to the Ford Motor Company, tobacco companies, a steel
maker, South Africa, Australia, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia,
among other buyers. When the British government chose the last LEO to
handle its telephone billing system, Tony Benn, postmaster general,
praised Lyons for ?standing up to and beating on its own merits? the
competition from overseas.

But the Lyons computer operation merged into a succession of companies,
which chose to use American technology, not least for its universality.
Many have compared LEO?s experience with that of the de Havilland
Comet, which was the first commercial passenger jet in production but
which lost out to Boeing jets.

Mr. Caminer, who was appointed to the Order of the British Empire in
1980 for developing a computer system for the European Common Market,
had many explanations for the failure of Lyons to press its advantage.
One was that it had no idea how rapidly technology would advance.
Another was: ?We were too often arrogant about always knowing best.?

Mr. Caminer is survived by his wife, the former Jackie Lewis, a son and
two daughters. The remnants of Lyons predeceased him in 1998.

On Jan. 9, 1965, when the first LEO computer was turned off forever,
The Daily Mail published an obituary. It recalled how LEO hummed, and
once made a noise that sounded like a hornpipe to Prince Philip.

?Let it be remembered that throughout almost 14 years of life he worked
a 24-hour shift on one dreary problem after another without complaining
and spent, at the most, only a few hours off sick,? the computer?s
obituary said. 

Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary