Tuesday, November 29, 2011

First business computer - in a tea shop?

Yes, according to this article in the Telegraph, a British newspaper, the first computer developed for business purposes was built by the Lyons Company, which operated a chain of tea shops and manufactured a line of biscuits. An innovative company, in 1951 they built a computer to calculate the costs of their weekly bakery production run, a task that had been done by hand, by a large staff of clerks. Called "LEO," the enormous machine looks quite antique now, but it was a tremendous advancement in its time. There is a more technical article on it here.

You could find many articles on computing history in article databases the library offers, for example in Academic Search, Computers and Applied Sciences or ScienceDirect.

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