The Story of LEO

LEO, more formally known as Lyons Electronic Office, was the world's first business computer, having been developed by the British company J. Lyons & Co. Ltd. between 1947-1954. John Simmons was very much the genius behind this adventure into business process re-engineering. His papers are archived at the Modern Record Centre at Warwick University in Coventry, England. Many of these contain valuable information about the ideas behind the LEO development. The Centre has recently selected some of the papers related to LEO and set them up as a separate digitized archive which includes a short introduction to the LEO story by Frank Land. These can be accessed at: