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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.
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
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
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
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.
The article said the company owned tea shops not that it was a tea company.
null
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.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
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.
Deleted
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!
Super-size your internet, drive-thru downloads, I'm lovin' it.
rewriting history since 2109
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....
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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)
The water must also be poured onto the leaves at 98.2'c, and preferably still be above 95' when it hits the stomach lining. This helps in the leather-making process. (You don't want it too much colder, say in the 60' temperature range, or you'll get cancer. (pubmed report))
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 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.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
Yes precisely this seriously:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=eELH0ivexKA
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. - Mark Twain
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.
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.
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.
... were originally two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions and a sesame seed bun.
Anybody want a peanut?
This makes sense, seeing as you'd need that leather lining to stomach English cooking. To those about to mod me down, I love Yorkshire pudding! Please take that into consideration before you obliterate me.
Um, pretty much every source of economic data. Take a look at the US Census data since 1980. Total manufacturing output in the 2000's is several times greater. As population grows the number of things made follows. It's not of an indicator of economic health, but the US definitely makes more crap today than it did in 1980.
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 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
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 Angel, Islington from the British Monopoly board, was a Lyons Tea House.
simon
as some from derbyshire we're renaming them to freedom puddings...
bloody plantagenets