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Dead At 92, Business Computing Pioneer David Caminer
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.'"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/2188963/David-Caminer.html
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.
And still no first post.
Strange isn't it. This is one of the brighter minds of Computer Science and still I, a computer geek, have never heard of him.
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
âoeAmericans canâ(TM)t believe this,â Paul Ceruzzi, a historian of computing and curator at the National Air and Space Museum, said in an interview last week. âoeThey think youâ(TM)re making it up. It really was true.â
And we don't! AS our manufacturing and the rest of our economy is rotting away (Thanks for nothing corp America), we are constantly reassured that our talent as a country is creativity (at least that's what the economists say - everything is for the better!). The rest of the World doesn't have this talent. In other words, we are number one and no other can or has created anything. Why we invented the telephone, airplanes, radar, the steam catapult for aircraft carriers, democracy, republics, etc....
So there! And if this fact is proven wrong, then I will completely lose all hope of my country's economic future and my own.
Is it me or does it just a bit off-putting to use an analogy to equate some of the world's more innovative pioneers with the mc'nugget?
The first output was something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
rewriting history since 2109
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.
... McDonald's had invented the Internet
In the Al Gore sense of "invent the Internet", perhaps. They commercialized someone else's invention.
The article said the company owned tea shops not that it was a tea company.
null
I love English tea, but the standard milk-and-sugar serving is just too much. Black, please.
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!
From TFA: So it was only natural it would look at the electronic brains that scientists in the United States were developing for scientific and military purposes as a way to streamline its own empire
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.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
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.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
The tea industry was so big at one point that it was profitable to build an entire class of ship specifically for tea and nothing else. Lyons deals with all kinds of commodities, many perishable, so high-power optimization was viable. As for "glacially slow", Colossus may have been slow per calculation but performed thousands of calculations in parallel and in benchtests compared favourably with a Pentium doing the same work. Early computers could, if built well, be damn fast and there are still problems where an analogue computer will outperform a digital computer at the same task.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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
You can't take the sky from me...
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.
It's not about tea - but as the New Scientist says, the exact equivalent to Lyons is something like Pizza hut. Lyons were the absolute masters of logistics in their time - they ran a huge network of outlets to a consistent quality with a very large turnover. So, they were really an ideal company to experiment with this new technology. Lyon's logistical expertise was such that during the Second World War they ran one of the largest bomb making factories in the world, just a couple of miles from where I live. One in seven bombs dropped on Germany came from the Lyons factory at Elstow.
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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 table, complicated calculations had to be done with a slide rule. Now your phone probably does all that.
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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.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Yes precisely this seriously:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=eELH0ivexKA
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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.'"
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.
or McDonald's had invented the Internet.
McDonalds may not have invented the internet, but they did advance food networking...
Not only are two people in New York and Los Angeles testing the same flavor when they eat their hamburgers, they may have even come from the same cow.
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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.
And we've been here before.
Is there a more useful Slashdot post than a simple link to the story w/out registration? I wish the editors would "correct" links that require registration before posting. I nearly always search for an alternate source or skip the story when faced with a registration form.
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 original tasks was payroll automation - a huge task in a massive company with hundreds of pay grades and pre-decimalised coinage. But LEO came into its own when it was to process orders from these shops.
At the end of each day's business, managers would telephone a summary of their day's trading and their next order to Lyons HQ where the information was put on to punch tape and sent to LEO. The computer could then produce a collation of the orders to go to the bakeries, print dispatch slips, even generate a packing order for the trucks so that fragile items were added last!
LEO was even used to predict buying patterns - which foods were most popular at certain times of the year or in certain regions and ensure that supplies were ready for timely manufacture.
LEO was so successful it was then put to work for the government determining tax information for the Chancellor's budget and timetabling British Railways. Naturally it was such an advanced computer that it had to be killed off by one of the Labour Party's periodic bouts of nationalisation. The spin-off LEO Computers Ltd. was folded into the larger English Electric to become English Electric LEO, which then became English Electric LEO Marconi and finally ICL who eventually disappeared into the maw of Fujitsu.
There's an excellent book about LEO: 'A Computer Called LEO' by Georgina Ferry, ISBN 1841151866, Harper Collins UK, 2004. Well worth anyone's time. And the LEO project is remembered at LEO Computers Society.
"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)."
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
For slashdot now is yoda writing titles, hmm? Yes, hmmm.
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 revealed a hint of anti-american sentiment. It is my experience that any American interested in the first systems analyst wouldn' care where he/she is from.
Very easy repetitive tasks? Just a guess.
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... were originally two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions and a sesame seed bun.
Anybody want a peanut?
Yeah, just skip the story instead of using bugmenot. That'll show them!
Ya learn something new every day.
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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
That's not true. Mechanical calculators were common in calculation-intensive businesses. Further, IBM sold semi-programmable mechanical tallying and report-writing equipment based on punched cards since roughly the 1920's. Programmers wrote programs by using a "patch-board" panel with point-to-point plugs and switches. True, such a system was not as flexible as an electronic computer can be, but a lot of business calculations were done this way since the 1920's.
Table-ized A.I.
Fair enough, should have said there were no electronic calculators.
My point stands that math was much more complicated and expensive 60 years ago than it is now - something that's hard to understand for many of us. I remember when my hich school chemistry teacher told us about using slide rules when he went to the Colorado School of Mines. Now there probably aren't even many teachers that remember those days.
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From TFA
"The finished LEO, which had less than 100,000th the power of a current PC, could calculate an employeeâ(TM)s pay in 1.5 seconds, a job that took an experienced clerk eight minutes."
Thats a 320 times increase in speed. Plus less likely to have manual processing errors. And that is for every pay run.
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Here's some links to the IBM mechanical business machines:
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/tabulator.html
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/407.html
With successive stages of punched-card processing, fairly complex calculations could be made. One could roughly think of each stage as an SQL clause: SELECT (filter columns), then WHERE (filter cards, or "rows"), then maybe a GROUP BY, then a SORT BY, and then perhaps feed those back to another set of SELECT and WHERE cycles again if needed. Still, a human operator usually had to store, load, and monitor the various card stacks over each stage.
Table-ized A.I.
Not sure why, but I got into TFA without any nags.
Furthermore, the other article isn't the same; for instance you missed this great quote:
Except for the "without complaining" part, I'd think they must be talking about Marvin.
Nothing to see here; Move along.
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.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
and there are still problems where an analogue computer will outperform a digital computer at the same task.
I'm calling bullshit on this Sir.
Care to elaborate?
Ok , you wouldn't find a tea company today building its own hardware , but you may well find them writing their own software. Many many non tech companies still do this - banks, insurance , market research to name but a few. Possibly even McDonalds and pizza hut do too but I'm just guessing.
I actually work in a market research company and we DO design our own set top box and handheld hardware though obviously the actual manufacturing is outsourced because the functionality we need from it is simply not available commercially.
So don't be too surprised if you find non-tech companies poking their fingers in the techy pie occasionally.
Was he ever the systems analyst interviewed weekly in The Onion's American Voices feature?
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Well the first ones in the US where used to calculate ballistics tables. The first ones in the UK where used to break the German code in WWII.
The computer that sent men to the moon was probably in the same league as a cell phone.
You can do a lot with a little if you don't have to make it idiot proof and don't have to have little pictures for every command.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The zealot-to-evidence ratio is sky high on the web.
Writers imply. Readers infer.