Goodbye Mr. Chips

I love obituaries. Clarification: I don’t love the part of an obit that means that somebody, somewhere, is grieving the loss of a loved one. But you sure can learn a lot about a person, especially when an entire exciting life is crammed into a couple newspaper columns.

Such is the case with the recent obituary of David Caminer, who died on June 19th. He was 92. I’d never heard of him before but, as it turns out, he is credited with helping to develop “the world’s first business computer.”

Short version: Caminer was a leftist Brit who scoffed education and instead went to work for J. Lyons & Company, a big tea outfit in England, when he was 21. Tea being to England what coffee is to Seattle, the company thrived, operating tea shops, a catering branch, hotels, and other endeavors. Which meant they had a lot of information to keep track of.

As his obit reports, “Mr. Caminer’s role was finding ways to retain traditional clerical rigor while speeding up the company’s logistics and finances many times over.” So he took a look at early computer research being conducted in the U.S. and, using that came up with LEO — Lyons Electronic Office. “LEO performed its first calculation on November 17, 1951, running a program to evaluate costs, prices and margins of that week’s baked output.”

Quoting an article in New Scientist, the obit offers the following analogy: “In today’s terms it would be like hearing that… McDonald’s invented the Internet.”

The first LEO was turned off in 1965, earning the computer an obituary of its own, one crediting the machine for so many hours of service.

Reading the obituary, and all the data that Caminer had to manage, I had to think of our own adventures creating Spacer, the software application specific to our new business model.

Maybe we’ll name a teapot after LEO.