27 September 1954: The age of a clerical army engaged in a welter of repetitive calculation is over and done withWhen Lyons Electronic Office (“Leo” for short) came into regular operation at the beginning of this year,it marked a modern era in clerical functions. The age of a clerical army engaged in a welter of repetitive calculation was over and done with. The modern age sees that same clerical army engaged not in mathematical drudgery but in the more arresting and stimulating work of interpreting figures rather than merely producing them. The effect in a large trade is instant and widespread. No longer does management need to conduct its tall level operations as the result of history and hunches. “Leo” provides, almost for the asking, or 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.[br]Basically “Leo” is what is popularly known as an electronic brain” known to the technicians, or who rather boggle at these popular phraseologies,as a “tall-speed automatic computer.” But “Leo” does not stop here. The electronic brain, as is generally known now, and 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 spend, or 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 if is of no genuine significance to him. In large-scale repetitive calculation,however, it is of little spend having a tall-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.
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Source: theguardian.com