5 May
2000
5 May
'00
12:54 a.m.
There is an excellent book about the Leo machines by Peter J. Bird - Leo,
The First Business Computer. Published by Hasler Publishing. Only
published in 1994 and still available for amazon and co.
Hamish Carmichael's ICL anthology, published by Laidlaw Hicks is also an
very good account of the various mergers and rivalries between the UK early
computer companies. Also still available.
Kevin Murrell
----- Original Message -----
From: Will Jennings <xds_sigma7(a)hotmail.com>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Friday, May 05, 2000 1:39 AM
Subject: Lyons, Elliot, GEC, ICL, et al.
OK, for what its worth;
Lyons Brothers built the LEO because they wanted to computerize their
business, but they couldn't find anyone selling commercial machines, so
they
went ahead and built their own. LEO, by the way,
stands for Lyons
Electronic
Office. The LEO was actually completed in early 1951,
and other companies
heard about it and wanted it, so Lyons suddenly were in the computer
business. Most people don't know this, but the LEO is the first commercial
computer, it beat UNIVAC I to market by several months. Lyons Brothers,
Elliot Automation, English Electric, Marconi, ICT, and GEC are all
related,
not to mention ICL. In 1969, Marconi, GEC, Elliot
Automation, and English
Electric merged to form Marconi Elliot Computer Systems Ltd., which kept
selling the various dissimilar lines (there is some mention of AEI also
being a part of this). In 1970 or 71, the company became known as GEC
Computers Ltd., and some parts (I don't know what ones for sure), were
combined with ICT to form ICL. Basically, GEC Computers Ltd. was all of
the
real-time systems, and ICL was all the data-processing
systems. Somehow
Lyons Brothers fits into this picture also, I'm just not sure how. ICL was
first bought by an English electronics company called STC plc in 1984,
then
Fujitsu bought 80% of ICL in 1990. Later Nortel bought
STC and then in
1998
Fujitsu bought the other 20% of ICL from Nortel. As a
side note, Fujitsu
also owns all of Amdahl, having excercised their option to buy the rest of
the company, since as you probably know, they put up the money to start
Amdahl and as such always owned a large chunk of it. I think GEC has
subsided back into Marconi, but I'm not sure, the whole ICL and GEC story
is
a huge mess really. I hope you don't mind me
taking the chance to give you
more info about them than you probably wanted. BTW, I know Elliot Brothers
(later Elliot Automation) dates back to 1795, and I'm fairly sure some of
the other companies involved are that age or older. If anyone has more
info
I'd like to hear it, I have info on a bunch of
models of
ICL/GEC/Elliot/English Electric machines too. I'd most like to know more
about ICT...
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