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Dead At 92, Business Computing Pioneer David Caminer
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Jun 29, 2008 04:36 PM
from the 92-and-holding dept.
from the 92-and-holding dept.
Brooklyn Bob points out this fascinating obituary of David Caminer, the first systems analyst. "The tea company he worked for developed their own hardware and software — in 1951! Quoting New Scientist: '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.'"
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Daily Telegraph - same story, no registration reqd (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/2188963/David-Caminer.html [telegraph.co.uk]
I've said it before (Score:5, Insightful)
And I'll say it again. The British take their tea very seriously. It should surprise nobody that a tea company would be working on microcomputers. After all, these are the same companies that started wars and colonized new lands.
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...And redeem her for a valuable prize.
Down with the queen!
Please hold the milk (Score:2)
Re:Please hold the milk (Score:4, Funny)
Sorry,you can't possibly love English tea, at least not the real stuff. English tea cannot be drunk black. It is stewed in a teapot for 30 minutes specifically to turn the stomach lining to leather.
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Re:Please hold the milk (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Please hold the milk (Score:4, Funny)
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Cup Of Brown Joy (Score:4, Funny)
Yes precisely this seriously:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=eELH0ivexKA [youtube.com]
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Drool Britannia! (Score:3, Informative)
And never managed to maintain the loyalty of their colonies and ended up losing them all.
Another nitpick: LEOs were not exactly mini. See the pictures on this enthusiasts web site [leo-computers.org.uk].
And we've been here before [slashdot.org].
Re:I've said it before (Score:4, Insightful)
According to Douglas Adams, in the future, computers will be making beverages for us that are "almost but not quite, entirely unlike tea"
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McDonalds? (Score:3, Funny)
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I don't think you actually understood that comparison.
They're not saying that it's like McDonald's inventing the McNugget. They're saying that it would be like McDonald's, the fast food company, inventing a computer from scratch.
Output (Score:5, Funny)
The first output was something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
No surprise, actually (Score:5, Insightful)
The best solutions don't come from engineers sitting around brainstorming. It's almost exclusively domain-specific knowledge that only practitioners have that makes good systems good. Lyons needed account tracking software for their tea and bakery business, and it's likely that there was simply no idea at IBM or any other "computer" shop that such a need existed.
Engineers are pretty much replaceable cogs in software development. It's the people who have real world needs that require real world solutions that bring these things into existence.
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That's what I've been telling mom for years about me living in the basement. Think of all the innovations we'd lose if I moved out!
Re:No surprise, actually (Score:5, Interesting)
While I recognize and agree with the point you're trying to make, I think it's a bit overstating the case to call engineers replaceable cogs. If you're working withing a relatively solved problem domain, and we're talking about a certain minimal level of skill, then this is true.
But in _this_ case we're talking about a completely nascent problem space. Caminer's brilliance was recognizing that computers could solve the problem. Yet it still took John Pinkerton with heaps of assistance from the Math Lab at Cambridge to design and build a computer with operating system sufficient to the task.
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Engineers are pretty much replaceable cogs in software development. It's the people who have real world needs that require real world solutions that bring these things into existence.
Try looking at a real mechanical machine with a broken cog. Not only does it tend to bring the machine to a halt, it can also do permanent damage. Yes, you can replace good cogs with other good cogs but try replacing good cogs with poor cogs and see how far you'll get. Sure all requirements come from the "real world", I'd just like to point out that often the requirements have been there, the money/manhours to it has been there and yet it's spectacularly failed at bringing things into existance.
It's a widel
Tea company? (Score:3, Insightful)
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It also owned Tea plantations and flour mills.
In further trivia, Nigella Lawson, the TV chef is the daughter of the Lyons Heiress Vanessa Salmon
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Drinking? surely they must be paying someone to drink the stuff.
Pizza Hut technology (Score:2, Funny)
like hearing that Pizza Hut had developed a new generation of microprocessor
You didn't see that commercial yet? It's the one where they also introduced the Extreme Cheesy-Cheesy Extreme Pepperoni Pizza. The microprocessor is in the crust!
This would be an American article then... (Score:5, Informative)
Why do Americans have this urge to claim the credit for everything?
The Germans built a computer during WWII, and the brits built Colossus computers to break German codes. The University of Manchester built their first computer in 1948, and another in 1949, even the aussies had built CSIRAC in 1949, two years before LEO, and yet the NY times has to claim the LEO was based on what 'American Scientists' were doing.
There's a whole big world out there, and America doesn't have a monopoly on innovation.
Deal with it.
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Why do Americans have this urge to claim the credit for everything?
To create a overwhelming sense of national pride.
Re:This would be an American article then... (Score:5, Informative)
As far as I recall the history, they didn't ask Americans anything. They were examining business methods round the world, and had discussions with other businessmen - both in America and Europe - as a matter of course. Computers (or Electronic Brains!) were being thought about at the time, and Lyons staff wrote a report saying that they should be investigated.
So a meeting was held with Maurice Wilkes of Cambridge, and the upshot was that Lyons sponsored the manufacture of the first commercially designed computer (and, more importantly, the first Business and System Analysts). There was no particular pressure or direction from any other company or country.
Oh, and another error - Lyons was NOT a tea company. It was a chain of restaurants, placed in city centres; they were called 'Lyons Corner Houses' because Joe Lyons, the owner, figured that a corner position got trade from two streets simultaneously. They typically served the office lunchtime trade - their waitresses were known as 'Nippies', because of their fabled speed of service. Tea would have been served, or coffee, and cakes, sandwiches or light meals. It's like calling McDonalds a Dairy Farmer because they serve milk shakes....
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There's a damn fine history of the LEO computers, written with input from Caminer himself: A Computer Called Leo [amazon.com], by Georgina Ferry.
I just dug out my copy to get all the names right :o)
Konrad Zuse (Score:2)
"From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Konrad Zuse (pronounced [ËkÉ"nÊat ËtsuËzÉ(TM)]; June 22, 1910 Berlin - December 18, 1995 Hünfeld) was a German engineer and computer pioneer. His greatest achievement was the world's first functional program-controlled Turing-complete computer, the Z3, in 1941 (the program was stored on a punched tape)."
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Point taken, but FYI:
"J. Lyons and Co., one of the UK's leading catering and food manufacturing companies in the first half of the 20th century, sent two of its senior managers to the USA in 1947 to look at new business methods developed during the Second World War. During their visit they came across digital computers then used exclusively for engineering and mathematical computations. They saw the potential of computers to help solve the problem of administering a major business enterprise."
http://en.wiki [wikipedia.org]
Re:This would be an American article then... (Score:5, Informative)
People in most nations seem to have this urge. Brazilians claim the airplane was invented by a Brazilian [wikipedia.org] and Italians claim the telephone was invented by an Italian. [wikipedia.org]
When you consider a "computer" as a generic machine capable of performing calculations, maybe it could be claimed the Greeks [wikipedia.org] did it, but if you limit your definition to an electronic equipment doing calculations by binary logic, then it's true, an American [wikipedia.org] has the earliest claim.
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Tea and bombs (Score:5, Informative)
First systems analyst from the UK? (Score:2)
I guess if you ignore Charles Babbage and Ada Augusta Lovelace? They too invented their own software and hardware long before 1951 aka the Analytical Engine, etc. While it didn't actually work right, IBM fixed the problems and made a working version later, and they can be considered Systems Analysts before that term was phrased.
uhh (Score:3, Funny)
Uhhh...actually we didn't really need a redefinition in "today's terms." I mean, it's still like hearing a tea company developed their own hardware and software.
Title by Yoda (Score:2)
Damn Americans (Score:2, Interesting)
First the historian says,
"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."
Then the article says, .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.
Seems like the historian doesn't know the history and reveal
The OSI Seven Layers... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:So close (Score:5, Interesting)
My guess is because he was on the commercial side of the business (though the FT referred to him as a "systems analyst" in their obit. yesterday). From the little I know of academic teachings, it's not considered trendy to focus on such areas - particularly as he didn't program in Java
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Re:So close (Score:5, Funny)
From the little I know of academic teachings, it's not considered trendy to focus on such areas - particularly as he didn't program in Java
Yeah, he probably programmed in T.
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Hahah, I was *so* going to make that comment, if you hadn't preceded me - you bastard ;o)
Seriously though: what's the point dragging Java in this discussion? These facts happened three decades before Java even appeared.
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I learned about this guy during my Computer Studies degree course. Really interesting chap, it's amazing how few people have heard of LEO compared to Colossus... but then I guess that an accounting computer for a chain of cafes is a lot less interesting than WW2 code breaking!
Interesting (sort of) related fact - the Lyons Tea Houses which were a fixture of pretty much every English town became Wimpey, the British burger chain, now confined to run down shopping centres. And another (on a roll here): The An
Re:Another "Inventor" (Score:4, Funny)
Super-size your internet, drive-thru downloads, I'm lovin' it.
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Super-size your internet, drive-thru downloads, I'm lovin' it.
Didn't MS already do that? I mean your browser has to look rather super-sized with all those spyware toolbars, and drie-thru downloads are a lot like the drive-by downloads that IE has....
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I think I would count the number of extensions that weight down the typical Firefox browser before I began pointing fingers.
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What kind of tasks could be worth the expense of building one?
To calculate taxes. Or you could just throw your tea in the harbor.
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Not only did Lyons build the first industrial computer, they even had a bureau service running as soon as the machine was ready to take on the extra work.
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What sort of calculations could possibly be worth the expense of building an early computer to do them with? That's one thing I have wondered about : these machines had about as much memory as a sheet of notebook paper, and were glacially slow at calculations. What kind of tasks could be worth the expense of building one?
FTFA: millions of daily transactions
Re:What on earth would they do with this computer? (Score:4, Insightful)
glacially slow by what standard? the mechanical adding machine? you could have half your office staff performing routine calculations with all the opportunities for error that implied.
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What sort of calculations could possibly be worth the expense of building an early computer to do them with? That's one thing I have wondered about : these machines had about as much memory as a sheet of notebook paper, and were glacially slow at calculations. What kind of tasks could be worth the expense of building one?
Not sure for this one, but most of the early computers had to do mathematics. You have to remember that there were no calculators then. To calculate anything from a business perspective you would have to lay it all out and do the math manually - a time consuming and error prone process. With the computer they could input all the raw data and get the right result out the other side.
I think most of us can't imagine living in a world where math had to be done by hand, logarithms had to be looked up in a
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Finally, the company was seen as a very progressive concern - from the way it treated its workers (many of whom were women), through to adopting the latest business techniques - often from the US.
One of the o