It’s an Earth-Rod Earth-Rod, Earth-Rod

Listening to the sounds of the LEO Computers.

I finished A Computer Called LEO yesterday and was happy to see some links other than my old lecturer being involved. LEO computers was formed as a division of Lyons (of the tea-shops and ice-cream) but was eventually merged with the computer division of English Electric which happened to be part of Marconi. They later merged with other manufacturers under the supervision of the Government and the LEO staff became absorbed and subordinate to those from the other companies. The company became ICL which no longer exists with that name having turned into Fujitsu Services. I worked for Marconi though their business had moved on from mainframe computers by the time I got to them – actually they got to me because without moving desks I worked for – Deep Breath – Plessey, GEC-Plessey Telecommunications (GPT) and then Marconi. That great company no longer exists in this country, being split up into two parts one of which is called Telent and the other part which has become part of Ericsson. Not that it matters because I no longer work for either of them. There is another link which has to remain secret for the moment though it does involve the possibility that some of the people I work with actually saw a LEO machine.

The sad part is that like the whole Betamax/VHS thing, the LEO computers were better than those of the other manufacturers and yet did not become the market leaders. In addition the staff had a policy of higher integration with the client companies – a culture of consultancy and investigation rather than ship-it-out-and-forget-it. The sound-bite from the book would be that the management structure at LEO computers was task-based rather than role-based; there was a concentration on getting things done rather than getting things done by specific people. I am sure that management consultants would question the efficiency of this but left to themselves, this is what happens anyway.

It looks like we may go through the same issue with Blue-Ray/HD-DVD.