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Dead At 92, Business Computing Pioneer David Caminer

Posted by timothy on 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.'"

5 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. I've said it before by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

    1. Re:I've said it before by moosesocks · · Score: 3, 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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      -- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
  2. No surprise, actually by BadAnalogyGuy · · 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.

  3. Tea company? by HJED · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The article said the company owned tea shops not that it was a tea company.

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  4. Re:What on earth would they do with this computer? by westlake · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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?

    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.