4.4 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 27 November 2019
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
In the early 1950s, the leading British catering firm, J Lyons & Co, pioneered the world's first automated office system. It was baptised LEO - the Lyons Electronic Office - and was used in stock-taking, food ordering and payrolls for the company. Soon it was being hired out to UK government ministries and other British businesses. Mary Coombs worked on the first LEO and was the first woman to become a commercial computer programmer. She tells Mike Lanchin about her memories of those heady days when computers were still in their infancy.
Photo: LEO 2 in operation, 1957 (Thanks to The LEO Computers Society for use of archive)
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
0:24.9 | searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. Hello and welcome to the Witness History podcast from the BBC World Service. |
0:40.5 | First-hand accounts of events that have shaped our world. |
0:44.0 | I'm Mike Lanchin. |
0:46.0 | Today we're going back to the early 1950s |
0:49.0 | when a British catering company unveiled the world's first electronic business computer. |
0:55.0 | They called it Leo. |
0:57.0 | Leo stands for Lyons electronic office. |
1:05.0 | It took the idea of an ordinary mechanical calculating machine |
1:10.0 | and decided to turn it into electronics. This is Mary Coombs. She was the first woman to work on |
1:17.6 | Leo and in fact the first woman computer programmer in the field of commercial office computers. |
1:24.9 | She's now in her 90s, but she clearly enjoys reminiscing about those heady pioneering |
1:30.1 | days. |
1:31.1 | What did Leo look like? |
1:33.4 | Right, imagine a big rectangular room. |
1:36.8 | Here we had an area where there were some desks and the programming team, which was only about five of us. And then... and then beyond that there was the computer. The computer itself was on a |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.