A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Tea Shops and the world’s first office computer

скачать книгу бесплатно


Born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1902, John Richardson Mainwaring Simmons was the son and grandson of missionaries who dedicated their lives to spreading the Christian gospel in the Indian subcontinent. His mother died when he was only five. Two years later his father remarried, to a colleague in the Church Missionary Society. A boy of outstanding intellectual gifts, in 1920 John Simmons entered the University of Cambridge to read mathematics, and emerged three years later with first-class honours. At the time his choice of a career in a catering company was somewhat unexpected for a wrangler, the honorific title of Cambridge’s top mathematics graduates. It was even less expected that a company such as Lyons would regard pure mathematics as relevant to its day-to-day activities, beyond the basic task of accurate accounting. Yet Lyons had always been open to progressive ideas in managing its manufacturing operations; it was not hard for Booth to persuade the board that they needed to be equally progressive on the clerical side.

Simmons was unobtrusive in appearance; of medium height and build, he always dressed soberly in a jacket and tie. His hair was neatly combed straight back from his high forehead; his expression was habitually serious but even as a young man he carried an air of absolute conviction. He arrived at Cadby Hall knowing little of business. Nothing in his pious childhood or his years of intellectual endeavour at Cambridge had prepared him for the reality of life at Lyons. On his arrival he was put to work in a department where black-coated clerks still stood at Dickensian high desks entering figures in huge ledgers by hand. Typewriters and adding machines had been introduced into some Lyons departments before 1900 but there had been no serious attempt to rationalise office methods.

A quiet, austere and intellectually exacting man, Simmons found his spiritual home at Lyons; he was to remain with the company for forty-five years. Taken on in the junior role of statistician and management trainee, he nevertheless reported directly to Booth and so had unprecedented access to the highest levels of the Lyons management. Booth gave him a free hand to investigate clerical operations at Lyons and make recommendations. He immediately began to apply his analytical skills to the task of increasing efficiency through eliminating duplication and any unnecessary paperwork. He looked for rational alternatives to methods that had evolved in more or less ad hoc fashion. He streamlined and simplified, breaking jobs down into their component parts and allocating tasks to specialised clerks. He extended the use of office machines wherever they made economic sense.

His top-down approach – analysing the work of the clerks and then telling them how to do it better – owed a great deal to the examples of Taylor and Leffingwell, but he soon found that his mentors had underestimated the human factor. For example, Lyons had three central clerical departments: Accounts, which kept the basic records of incomings and outgoings and managed the payroll; the Stock Department, which kept stock records and computed the costs of producing and distributing Lyons products so that they could be priced accurately; and the Checking Department, which checked the cash takings of the catering establishments against the waitresses’ bills. These departments kept records that were intended only for the general managers on the board. The managers of the individual departments – Bakeries, Teashops and so on – had their own offices and kept separate records for their own purposes.

Simmons initially favoured greater centralisation, and began by trying to bring all clerical work into the three main specialist departments. But he very quickly learned that ‘arguments which applied to machines did not necessarily appeal to human beings’ – a lesson that devotees of scientific management often had to learn the hard way. Imagine his chagrin when he discovered that one departmental manager, deprived of his personal platoon of clerks and told to get the information he needed from the central departments, had simply recreated his original office within a year of the change. Simmons ruefully admitted that ‘records had better be kept where they were going to be used, even if it meant they were kept somewhat less efficiently’.

Other innovations proved more durable. Simmons saw that office machines, such as adding and bookkeeping machines, brought advantages in terms of accuracy and efficiency. There was a problem, however. The American machines were designed to work with the decimal system, suitable for US dollars and cents. The Britain of the 1920s (and indeed for almost fifty years afterwards) used the idiosyncratically non-decimal pounds, shillings and pence of sterling currency. Moreover, weights and measures each had their own units, none of them decimal. In 1928 Simmons solved the problem by training the clerks to convert currency and weights and measures into decimal units before carrying out calculations on the machines, and then back again afterwards. Five years later a textbook, Office Practice, by William Campbell, described this innovation as what was ‘usually’ done.

True to his ancestry, Simmons went about his work with a missionary zeal. The company was supportive of his incremental reforms, but after a few years he felt he needed to establish the scientific approach to management on a more permanent basis. The board agreed to let him set up a department of Systems Research within Lyons – a team of analysts who would investigate inefficiencies and bottlenecks in the company’s office systems and propose solutions. A forerunner of what was later called the Organisation and Methods Department, it was one of the first such research departments in the country. Once it was up and running Simmons recruited a twenty-four-year-old chartered secretary called Geoffrey Mills to manage it. Mills quickly became an effective evangelist for Simmons’s scientific approach, and later published a series of textbooks on office management. Up to this point British authors had been slow to follow the American consultant William Henry Leffingwell’s lead in providing the tools to educate a new generation of managers. Mills’s first book, Office Organization and Method (1949) was dedicated to John Simmons and acknowledged his ‘authoritative criticism and advice’. It referred to Leffingwell’s textbooks, but at the same time echoed Simmons’s own mature reflection on the limits of the scientific approach to running an office. ‘The clerks … are often the most difficult to understand. It is they who make office management an art as well as a science.’

Mills was the architect of another innovation, audacious in its simplicity, that lightened the load on Lyons’s clerical systems by using a new technology to make paperwork unnecessary. In 1935 Systems Research received a plea for help from the Wholesale Bakery Sales Department, which supplied bread and cakes directly to shops all over the country. They found that clerks were drowning in paper, copies of invoices and packing notes, all of which needed to be filed. By using an early microfilm camera, called a Recordak, to make the only record of customers’ orders, they were able to use the same paper order for pricing and valuation, then as a packing list and eventually to return it to the customer as an invoice, leaving nothing to file. It was the first commercial use of microfilm anywhere in the world.

Though they did not know it at the time, the questions Simmons’s young disciples in Systems Research set out to ask, and the analyses they produced – accompanied by beautifully drawn flow charts – were exactly those that would confront businesses two decades later as they grappled with the possibilities of computers in the office.

Simmons’s zeal for reform won him notice well beyond Lyons. In 1933 he became a member of the Office Management Association. A year later he was on the governing council, and by 1938 he was chairman, a post he held until 1950. The Association’s members included representatives of most of the major British industrial and commercial firms, and it regularly held conferences to discuss advances in methods and technology. Simmons, with the confidence born of absolute conviction, placed himself in the vanguard of this movement. If there was anyone in the country who had the experience and vision to recognise what computers could do for a business, it was him.

2 The Electronic Brain (#ulink_00d079e6-52a6-5b22-ab0f-aa964a19520e)

John Simmons was a hard man to convince. Here in his office were two of his most trusted lieutenants, Oliver Standingford and Raymond Thompson, babbling excitedly about an ‘electronic brain’ and asking his permission to visit a military research laboratory in the United States to find out what was going on in the field of electronic, digital computing in the aftermath of the Second World War. They seemed to think an electronic calculator might be relevant to their mission to increase clerical efficiency. Yes, he conceded, like them he had always dreamed of automating routine office work. But in 1946, with an exhausted economy and severe currency restrictions in force, it was absurd to think of buying an expensive American machine, even if such a machine existed.

Not that Simmons was opposed to the American trip itself; it had been his idea to send the two men across the Atlantic as soon as possible after the war was over to find out about the latest developments in office machines and office methods. The American office technology industry had virtually no counterpart in the United Kingdom, apart from its own licensed offshoots, and Simmons had long been used to monitoring American innovations as he developed his own approach to office management. He had made his own first visit to the United States, as a young trainee in 1925, to find out how big companies there managed their operations.

One of the companies Simmons had visited on that occasion was International Business Machines. IBM traced its origins to the invention of punched card calculators by a young New York engineer named Herman Hollerith at the end of the previous century. While working for the Bureau of the Census in Washington DC, Hollerith had invented a range of machines that could process the data from census returns by means of holes punched in cards. Hollerith’s innovation was so much faster than manual methods that it seemed little short of miraculous at the time. It received its first trial in the analysis of the 1890 US census. Clerks entered each citizen’s details on a single card, about the size of an elongated postcard, which was printed with a 40-column grid of numbers. By hitting a key on a keyboard corresponding to a particular position on the grid, the operator punched a hole in the card: the positions of the holes represented the citizen’s age, sex, employment category and so on. The stacks of cards were then fed into a ‘tabulating machine’. The machine sensed the positions of the holes through a matching matrix of spring-loaded pins, each of which completed an electrical circuit if it passed through a hole and thereby added one digit to the running total in one of the forty counters operating concurrently in the machine. Another type of machine called a sorter could arrange the cards in alphabetical or numerical order. With dozens of machines operating at once, Hollerith had a rough population count ready within six weeks, and detailed analysis of the results in just over two years. By contrast, the 1880 census, analysed with pencil and paper by almost 1,500 clerks, had taken seven years to complete.

Hollerith quickly saw the commercial possibilities of his machines, and after forming his Tabulating Machine Company in 1896 he successfully sold a number of installations to factories, insurance companies, telephone companies and other large businesses. In failing health, in 1911 he finally agreed to sell his company to a wealthy investor, Charles Ranlegh Flint, for $2.3 million. Flint merged the company with the Computing Scale Company, which made scales for shopkeepers, and the International Time Recording Company, which made the clocks that employees punched as they arrived and left their workplaces each day. The new company was called C-T-R (the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company) and Flint appointed Thomas J. Watson Sr as general manager.

Watson had developed his consummate skills as a salesman in the aggressive culture of the National Cash Register Company (NCR). He quickly rose to the position of sales manager there, but was summarily fired in 1911 by the company’s eccentric founder John H. Patterson. On his arrival at C-T-R he immediately implemented many of the marketing and sales strategies he had learned at NCR, rapidly transforming it into a key player in the office machines business in the first decades of the twentieth century. Under Watson it was the company’s practice to lease its machines rather than selling them outright, ensuring a continuing income even in times when new customers were hard to find. It also held a monopoly on the supply of the cards. By 1924 the company had subsidiaries operating across four continents and in that year, to reflect its increasingly global impact, Watson changed its name to International Business Machines – IBM.

The following year, when John Simmons arrived from Lyons to pay a visit, the young Englishman had not found it difficult to resist the hard sell. To hire the machines and buy the specially made cards was expensive, and for the purposes of Lyons, the time and labour needed to punch the cards and feed them through the machine was not much less than that needed to do the work manually. Simmons judged the application of this technology to be of little relevance to the clerical administration of Lyons’s food manufacturing and distribution business. At that time he was more interested in extending his company’s use of manual adding and accounting machines, and in introducing the kind of office organisation extolled by American authors such as Leffingwell.

According to Oliver Standingford’s own account, when he and Thompson went to the United States in 1947 it was he who proposed that their research should include an enquiry into electronic computers. Standingford had joined Lyons straight from school in 1930 as a management trainee in the Stock Department. By that time, Simmons’s reforms had included a new system of cost accounting that included setting rigorous standards for every step in the food production chain. Everything was specified, from the value of the energy needed to bake a loaf of bread to the thickness of the jam spread on the Swiss rolls. Much of the clerical work in the Stock Department involved checking actual performance against these standards. It was a task that produced useful information for management but was short on job-satisfaction for most of the clerks who had to carry it out. Standingford had found himself supervising a section of ‘seventy calculator operators doing nothing but multiplying, adding, subtracting and writing down the answers by hand’.

Although he was no engineer, Standingford had looked at the technology around him and had begun to think about how it might be used to automate the work of the Stock Department clerks. Towards the end of the 1930s, he had come up with a scheme for ‘a device composed of the existing multiplying accounting machine and an arrangement of automatic telephone equipment and magnetic records … It would have stored information and recovered it automatically.’ Eager for the endorsement of a more technically minded supporter, he had shown his plans to Jack Edwards, Lyons’s chief electrical engineer. The most Edwards had been prepared to concede was that the idea was ‘not mad’.

With war in Europe becoming inevitable, there was no opportunity to take it further. Both Standingford and Edwards had signed up for war service and would not return to Lyons until 1945. As soon as the war was over, Edwards had sought out Standingford, having never forgotten the eager young manager’s questions. In the course of his war service as an engineer, Edwards had discovered that the military boffins had developed electronic devices to improve the aim of the anti-aircraft gunners who had successfully defended British skies. Electronics, he suggested, would be the technology of the future for office machines, much faster than the electromechanical machines then in use.

The field of electronics was launched almost a century ago with the invention of the thermionic valve (or vacuum tube as it is known in the United States). First invented by the British scientist John Ambrose Fleming in 1904, a valve looks like a small light bulb. It consists of a glass tube from which all the air has been removed, sealed to maintain the vacuum inside. Held upright, side by side within the tube, is a small number of metal wires, or electrodes. Fleming’s original invention had just two electrodes and so was known as a diode; later models incorporated up to five electrodes. Just as the valve in a plumbing system holds back water until someone opens it by turning a tap, thermionic valves allow current to flow in one direction only. They had revolutionised radio engineering during the 1920s, valve-based receivers replacing the crystal sets that had first been used to capture broadcasts. Edwards explained to Standingford that a calculating device made of valves would be thousands of times faster than any mechanical design as it would have no moving parts: all of its operations would be carried out by the movement of electrons in wires.

Standingford had hardly digested this information when he saw an article reporting that American engineers at the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia had developed just such a machine, which the article described as an ‘electronic brain’. He was immensely excited at this development, and determined to investigate further.

In the post-war reorganisation of Lyons, John Simmons had been appointed comptroller. This somewhat archaic title referred in Lyons to the head of management accounting – the person responsible for presenting the company’s figures to the board in such a way that managers could identify areas for action and improvement. The Comptroller’s Department gradually assumed overall responsibility for the management of clerical work in the other departments. Standingford was promoted to become one of the assistant comptrollers. It was in this capacity that Simmons proposed to send him to the United States, in May 1947, to study advances in office methods. Accompanying him on the trip would be Simmons’s chief protégé, Raymond Thompson. Sensing that he would have an able advocate in Thompson, Standingford sounded him out before the two of them approached Simmons to ask permission to visit the Moore School while they were in the United States. He was more successful that he could have hoped – Simmons later insisted to an interviewer that it was Thompson’s idea to investigate computers.

Thomas Raymond Thompson had been recruited by Simmons to further his ideas for Lyons. In May 1931 he had written to Simmons on his own initiative. ‘Being up in Town for a few days, I am venturing to call and see you on Tuesday,’ he began. ‘I am looking for a position as Secretary, Assistant Secretary, Accountant or Statistician of a progressive business and I thought it possible that you might have some such position to offer me.’ Simmons’s reputation had evidently travelled far; for the previous two years Thompson had been working as acting secretary to a Liverpool department store, Owen Owen. Born in 1907 into a relatively humble family – his father ran a grocer’s shop – he won a scholarship to Cambridge where, like Simmons, he proved to be one of the ablest mathematicians of his generation and graduated with first-class honours.

There the similarity between the two men ended. While Simmons was soft-spoken and unfailingly courteous, Thompson was excitable, choleric and arrogant. Where Simmons spoke and wrote with thoughtful elegance, choosing his phrases carefully and striving for clarity, Thompson’s enthusiasm at times ran ahead of his powers of expression, so that the words tumbled out with little sense of whether his listeners were keeping up. He was given to explosions of temper if he believed that subordinates were slacking, or if crossed in argument, and was universally known (behind his back) by his initials TRT, no doubt for their resemblance to the explosive TNT. He grasped new ideas with great rapidity and was full of what one of his acquaintances described as ‘intellectual joy’, a quality that could be appealing as long as you were not on the receiving end of one of his wrathful outbursts. Simmons, for whom the younger man had enormous respect, was able to channel Thompson’s enthusiasm and harness his undoubted ability. In 1947 Thompson had just been appointed chief assistant comptroller, and so was the more senior of the two men making the trip to the United States.

At the time the post-war shortage of labour had to some extent lessened the burden of clerical work at Lyons. The company had shared the indomitable spirit of wartime London, serving tea in its surviving teashops (70 were destroyed by bombs) throughout the Blitz and entertaining soldiers on leave with the gaiety of its Corner Houses. Part of Cadby Hall, which survived unbombed, became a depot where volunteers packed boxes of rations to be dispatched to serving soldiers. Many Lyons staff at all levels either joined the services or took up war-related work elsewhere. One group of Lyons managers even ran a munitions factory at Elstree. With exemplary efficiency, the factory had turned out millions of bombs by the time the war was over.

The vast majority of Lyons staff who had been on active service returned to their old jobs in 1945. The post-war picture was subtly altered, however. One symptom of the harsher climate was that the Nippies had disappeared from the teashops. Labour shortages in wartime had forced Lyons to convert the shops to self-service cafeterias, and when the war ended, rising costs obliged the company to keep the same system. No waitresses in the teashops meant no Checking Department – the job for which John Simmons had dreamed of using a miraculous automatic machine had simply ceased to exist. But his vision had fired the imagination of his younger colleagues: ‘the idea,’ as Simmons later put it to an interviewer, ‘was in our blood’.

Yet Simmons himself was at first surprisingly lukewarm about Standingford’s plan to look at computers in the United States. Being unaware of any moves towards electronic computing in the United Kingdom, he assumed that the only way to acquire a machine of the ‘electronic brain’ variety would be to buy it from an American supplier, and it was virtually impossible for British firms to spend such large sums of money overseas at the time. But before he finally came to a decision he consulted his mentor, the ageing company secretary George Booth. Booth expressed the indulgent view that ‘youth should be given its head, even if that head contains unusual ideas’. (At the time Standingford was thirty-seven and Thompson forty, but such things are relative: Booth was seventy-eight.)

So Simmons wrote to Dr Herman Goldstine, a researcher then at the maths and science hothouse, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, asking if Thompson and Standingford might come and see him. During the war Goldstine had been the US army liaison officer attached to the Moore School of Engineering in Philadelphia, where the ‘electronic brain’ – or to give it its proper name, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, ENIAC – had been developed for the US Army Ballistics Research Laboratory. He replied that the two men would be welcome to visit him. In the spring of 1947 (a spring all the more welcome in that it followed one of the worst British winters in living memory), Thompson and Standingford boarded a ship for the five-day crossing of the Atlantic.

It brought them to a land of plenty, even of excess: abundant food, central heating, large, gas-guzzling automobiles, all in stark contrast to the privations of bombed-out, rationed Britain. But they were far from dazzled by much of what they saw. In the course of a whirlwind programme of visits to office equipment suppliers and large organisations, they found nothing to match the systems that had been put in place at Lyons by Simmons and his team. They were astonished at the readiness of American managers to have their problems diagnosed by office machinery salesmen, whose remedies inevitably involved buying more of their equipment. Few seemed to have paid more than lip-service to the ideal of scientific management, apparently happy to believe that efficiency could be bought off the shelf from whichever salesman produced the most convincing argument or dazzling demonstration. For example, most companies were using IBM’s punched-card installations, but few had seriously evaluated their cost-effectiveness.

Even in the layout of office buildings, Thompson and Standingford felt that the new Lyons administrative building at Cadby Hall, Elms House, meticulously designed under John Simmons’s direction according to the principles of scientific management, was superior to any American organisation’s offices. While they were in Washington DC they took in the War Department’s Pentagon office building, completed only three years before at a cost of $80 million. Their guide reeled off the statistics: 30,000 workers, more than 6.5 million square feet of floor space on five floors, and 17½ miles of corridors. The two men left, laughing and shaking their heads incredulously at the time that would be wasted in getting from one part of the building to another.

At last they headed for Princeton and their meeting with Herman Goldstine – a meeting that made the whole trip worthwhile.

ENIAC

Herman Goldstine was the godfather of ENIAC, the ‘electronic brain’ that had caused such a fever of press excitement and had stimulated Raymond Thompson and Oliver Standingford to explore the possibilities of electronic computing. Having gained a PhD in mathematics from the University of Chicago, Goldstine joined the army when the United States entered the war. In 1942 he found himself assigned to the army’s Ballistics Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, with the rank of lieutenant. In his crisp uniform he looked every inch the military man, but he never truly left academic life behind; always hungry for ideas, when he found a good one he would do everything possible to make sure it had a chance to flourish.

One of his tasks was to liaise with the Moore School of Engineering, not far away in Philadelphia. Here, teams of women – ‘human computors’ – were being trained to calculate firing tables for artillery using mechanical desk calculators. With ordnance capable of firing along parabolic trajectories over a range of up to a mile, it was impossible for heavy gunners to take accurate aim by eye. The tables told the gunners how high to aim their weapons given a target at a certain range, calculated on the basis of the weight of the shell, its velocity on leaving the muzzle, and other variables such as the wind speed and direction, and the air temperature and density. A typical trajectory required 750 multiplications, and a typical firing table about 3,000 trajectories. Goldstine was desperate for an alternative to these human computers, whose work was time-consuming and vulnerable to error.

He found what he was looking for in a proposal to build an ‘electronic computor’ (sic) containing 5,000 valves, put forward in 1942 by John Mauchly, a physicist trained for war-related work in electronics at the Moore School. The army refused to take the proposal seriously until Goldstine took up Mauchly’s cause in the spring of 1943 and, through careful diplomacy and a persuasive manner, won from his superiors funding for an even larger revised version. Mauchly was not a great salesman for his own ideas, but was one of very few people in the world at that time who grasped the potential of electronics in computing. Before the war he had worked on the design of a (non-electronic) machine to automate numerical methods of weather forecasting. Through giving a talk on this work he had met John Atanasoff, a professor at Iowa State College, who invited him to see his own prototype computer. It was an electronic adder – properly a calculator rather than a computer – with a modest 300 valves, which Atanasoff had built with his graduate student Clifford Berry between 1939 and 1942.

Mauchly had spent five days discussing it, although he later denied that he had learned anything from Atanasoff. The work had received virtually no recognition at the time, and never advanced beyond a working prototype. But the priority of the little Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) was established years later in a successful bid to deny patents on aspects of the ENIAC design to the Moore School team. The question ‘who invented the computer?’ still rages on internet sites and in a succession of publications, and probably does not have a clear answer. Credit for being the first to build a valve-based prototype calculating machine should probably be shared between Atanasoff and Berry, and Konrad Zuse and Helmut Schreyer, who built an electronic demonstration model at the Technical University in Berlin in 1938.

Whatever it owed to his encounter with John Atanasoff, John Mauchly’s proposal exceeded anything previously seen in its scope and ambition. ENIAC, conceived by Mauchly but brought to life by teams of engineers working sixteen-hour days under the direction of the gifted Moore School engineer Presper Eckert, was a monster. As eventually completed in 1945, it was 2.5 metres high and nearly 50 metres long, its racks of valves, cables and other components arranged in a U-shape around the walls of a large room. It weighed over 30 tons, incorporated almost 18,000 valves, and cost the army $800,000. When it was working, ENIAC could perform 14 10-digit multiplications a second – 500 times faster than the best of the female ‘computors’ with their mechanical machines.

Its reliability, however, was in inverse proportion to its size: the only certain thing about its performance was that it would break down at least once a day. Valves, like light bulbs, have a limited life, and losing just one out of the 18,000 could ruin a calculation. More serious shortcomings were built into its design. Its builders could have cut the number of valves by over a third if they had considered representing the data in the machine in binary code.

Human calculators, having ten fingers, find it easiest to do arithmetic using decimal numbers. For computers, however, it makes much more sense to use the binary system. Binary code resembles Morse code in that it has only two symbols, usually written as o and 1. Any number can be converted into its unique binary equivalent – a string of os and 1S in which the value of each place is twice the value of its right-hand neighbour, rather than ten times as much as in the decimal system:

The advantage for computers of thinking in binary code is that their language consists of identical electrical pulses. At any point in a circuit, either there is a pulse, or there is not. On or off. 1 or 0. While a message written out in binary code might look extraordinarily cumbersome, it is in fact much quicker for a computer to work with instructions in this form than to incorporate some more complicated method of representing all the numbers and letters that human brains cope with quite happily.

In ENIAC, Eckert and Mauchly represented numbers in their conventional decimal notation. They used ten valves to represent a single digit: the fifth valve in a row of ten indicated the number five, and so on. Using binary code, just five valves would have been enough to represent all the numbers up to 31. To be fair to the Moore School designers, the theory of information processing based on binary digits, or ‘bits’ for short, was still being developed by Claude Shannon at Bell Labs when they began work on ENIAC. It has since been fundamental to the design of all modern computers.

Another major shortcoming of ENIAC was that it could not store programs. Mauchly had not taken the logical step that as programs consisted of information that could be represented digitally, they could be treated in the same way as data and stored in the computer itself. Each time ENIAC’s engineers wanted to run a new calculation they had to set up the program afresh by plugging wires into sockets, a process that could take a whole day.

The machine’s own builders realised that by the time they had it working, it was already obsolete. It deserves credit, however, for being the first to demonstrate publicly the power of electronic computing. It did work for the purpose for which it had been designed, and the army went on using it until 1955. Meanwhile, the publicity it attracted stimulated others to develop new avenues in the history of computing that would lead directly to the computers of today.

Among those who watched the building of ENIAC with interest was the Hungarian émigré mathematician John von Neumann. Von Neumann was by then an international star of mathematics, having established the mathematical foundations of quantum theory as well as developing the principles of game theory, which were to have a huge impact in economics, international relations, population biology and many other areas of modern experience. He was a founder member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and had become an adviser to the army in 1940 when he joined the scientific advisory committee of its Ballistics Research Laboratory. Since 1943 he had also been attached to the Los Alamos atomic bomb project. At that time he was trying to model the explosion of the bomb mathematically and to predict the ensuing fireball, but had not been able to find any machine capable of crunching the numbers fast enough.

According to Herman Goldstine’s widely circulated account, it was his own chance meeting with von Neumann that first brought ENIAC to the renowned mathematician’s attention. One day in 1944 Goldstine looked up while waiting on a station platform for a train from Aberdeen to Philadelphia and saw von Neumann just a few feet away. Conscious of his lowly academic status but never one to miss an opportunity, he introduced himself and they fell into conversation. When the topic turned to ENIAC and what it would be able to do, Goldstine remembered, ‘the whole atmosphere changed from one of relaxed good humor to one more like the oral examination for the doctor’s degree in mathematics’.

A few months later von Neumann became a consultant to the Moore School team on the design of a successor machine that would avoid the serious shortcomings that had become apparent as ENIAC came into operation. Called the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC), it would handle data more economically by using binary rather than decimal digits and, most important of all, it would incorporate the means to store programs along with data.

In June 1945 von Neumann summarised these discussions in a memo, ‘A First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC’, formalising the logical design of such a machine. The report described the principles of an automatic, digital machine, consisting of five basic components: a memory, which stores both program and data; a control unit, which interprets the program; an arithmetic unit, which adds and subtracts data as directed by the program; and input and output units, which read in the program and data and deliver the final results. Computers with this design – and that includes the vast majority of modern computers – have ever since been said to have ‘von Neumann architecture’.

As in the case of Atanasoff and Mauchly, much ink and hot air has been expended over the injustice done to Eckert and Mauchly in denying them credit, especially for the stored program concept. Eckert had not only thought about this before John von Neumann joined the project; he had begun to design and build a prototype store. There was undoubtedly a conflict of interest between the academics von Neumann and Goldstine, who wanted to see the ideas in the EDVAC design incorporated as widely as possibly, and the engineers Eckert and Mauchly, who were thinking about capitalising on its commercial possibilities. The academics won hands down when Goldstine, apparently on his own initiative, distributed the report with von Neumann’s sole name on it to a couple of dozen carefully selected recipients. That was all it took to ensure that von Neumann’s name was permanently cemented to the concept of a stored program. Although EDVAC itself, eventually delivered to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1949, was not an especially significant machine, every subsequent computer designer was influenced by the contents of von Neumann’s report.

When Oliver Standingford and Raymond Thompson came to see him in 1947, Goldstine was back in academic life. His boldness in accosting John von Neumann on that station platform had paid off, and he was now working as his assistant on a new computer project at the Institute for Advanced Study. The two men found him in his office on the elegant, tree-shaded campus. His mood was relaxed and expansive. If he was surprised at being approached by representatives of a commercial company, far from the world of theoretical physics and higher mathematics that he inhabited, he gave no sign of it. He listened closely as the two men explained that they were exploring the possibility of using electronic calculators in the office. ‘That’s not a problem I’ve thought about before,’ began Goldstine. Thompson eagerly explained how much of the work of the Lyons clerks amounted to routine calculation, and how their whole approach to office systems was based on distilling useful information from the mass of data.

Goldstine instantly saw the point, and became tremendously enthusiastic. Sketching furiously on a yellow pad, he launched into a description of possible approaches to the problem given the technology that had been developed so far. At the same time he explained the advantages of electronic calculators of the type he was now working on over previous types of calculating machine. The most obvious was their speed of operation. While an IBM punched card tabulator could carry out the same processes of addition and subtraction, its speed was limited by the speed of its mechanical moving parts. The electronic calculator, in contrast, operated at the speed of an electron moving in space – in principle, each step in a calculation could be completed in less than a millionth of a second.

The real source of an electronic calculator’s power, said Goldstine, was its potential to store its own program along with interim and final results. It would operate automatically – there was little or no need for human intervention in the course of a run. While punched card machines could carry out as many parallel operations as there were columns on the card (the standard had increased from 40 to 80 since Hollerith’s time), most electronic computers operated serially, taking one instruction or piece of data from the store at a time. However, the gain in speed and the possibility of running a large number of different operations in a single program gave the electronic computer overwhelming superiority.

Goldstine finished by giving Thompson and Standingford a list of everyone he knew about in the United States who was doing serious work on electronic computing. Then, enjoying the astonishment of his listeners, he dropped his bombshell. ‘And, of course, there’s Professor Douglas Hartree in Cambridge, England.’

Hartree had recently been appointed Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University. Goldstine informed his astonished listeners that one of Hartree’s new colleagues was building a state-of-the-art computer in the Mathematical Laboratory there. The two men had come 3,000 miles to find out that a computer was already under construction a couple of hours’ drive away from Lyons’s headquarters. Goldstine warmly recommended that Thompson and Standingford should talk to Hartree about their ideas for a business computer. As soon as they had left, he sat down and dispatched a letter to Cambridge on their behalf.

With a much clearer understanding of the technology, and buoyed up by Goldstine’s enthusiasm, Thompson and Standingford then made a tour of every organisation on his list. They were not able to see ENIAC itself, which had been taken over by the army and was being rebuilt at their Aberdeen firing range. Permission initially granted was suddenly withdrawn on the grounds of confidentiality – but Goldstine said later that the army’s engineers had probably failed to get the notoriously unreliable machine working and were too embarrassed to admit it. At the Moore School itself, where ENIAC had been built in a spirit of adventure and enthusiasm, they found that the disbanding of the original team had left ‘a general air of apathy’. A smaller experimental calculator was built and working, but no one showed the smallest interest in their ideas on office computing.

Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, who had designed and built ENIAC, had left the Moore School a year earlier (following a dispute with Goldstine and von Neumann about the right to patent their invention) to form the Electronic Control Company. They, apparently alone among the early computer pioneers, planned to develop a computer for commercial production based on the EDVAC design, to be known as the Universal Automatic Calculator or UNIVAC. Naturally, a visit to their Philadelphia office was high on Thompson and Standingford’s list of priorities.

Eckert told them that he was talking to the Prudential Insurance Company of America about designing a machine to issue bills, and to carry out actuarial calculations. The big insurance companies had millions of policyholders and employed thousands of clerks to draft policies and send out bills for premiums. The office machinery suppliers had come up with some labour-saving devices for this kind of work, such as machines for printing frequently used addresses, but essentially the insurance business required heroic efforts of typing and filing. Prudential was the first and only example Thompson and Standingford came across of a company planning to use a computer for clerical work. A visit to its offices in Newark, New Jersey, revealed a company with an attitude as progressive as that of Lyons, though in a completely different line of business. It had a large Methods Division (comparable to the Systems Research Department at Lyons), with an innovator at its head, Dr Edmund C. Berkeley (later to become the author of the first popular computing book, Giant Brains). He was apparently confident that his company would have a machine installed and working within two years. In addition to preparing bills for insurance premiums, Berkeley planned to use the machine to prepare contracts, storing the 2,000 standard clauses and programming the machine to select those required in individual cases. This was the first Thompson and Standingford had heard of the possibilities computers offered for what we now call word processing. As things turned out, the Electronic Control Company was dogged by financial problems; in 1950 Prudential cancelled its contract with Eckert and Mauchly and later bought its first computer from IBM.

Extraordinary as it seems today, Eckert and Mauchly were out on a limb in perceiving a need for a general purpose commercial computer which could be produced for sale. The obvious candidates to pursue such a development were the existing office machine companies, who already had the customers and the sales forces to exploit a new market. Those that the Lyons pair visited, such as IBM, NCR and Burroughs, were secretive about their own research but they seemed to be more concerned to protect their traditional products than to develop entirely new ones. Standingford later wrote: ‘We were given a polite hearing, lunch and the sort of restrained reception reserved for the mentally unstable.’

It was a relief to have their confidence restored with a second visit to Goldstine. They found he had spent the intervening weeks thinking about the special requirements of office computing, and he gave them a detailed list of the components their computer would need. This time he took them to his engineering labs and showed them not only his partly built computer but prototype peripherals such as a device that would load programs and data into the machine through spinning magnetic wire (a forerunner of magnetic tape) from one reel to another. Profuse in their gratitude for Goldstine’s information and encouragement, Thompson and Standingford returned to New York and the boat home in a state of intellectual euphoria. Their minds were ablaze with the possibilities before them. While some might have used the cruise home, on the Queen Elizabeth, as an opportunity to relax, they lost no time in recording the knowledge and impressions they had gained in the first draft of the lengthy report on their visit they would be presenting to the Lyons board.

The first three sections of the report disposed of their visits to office machine companies and other businesses, concluding that Lyons’s methods were already so advanced that they had little to learn in this sphere. But Section D, headed ‘Electronic Machines in the Office’, stands as a prophetic document, showing both a firm grasp of the capabilities and limitations of the technology then developing, and a vision of where it all might lead. It was never published at the time, circulating only within Lyons, but in Britain at least no comparable account of the subject had ever been written.

Thompson and Standingford were unequivocal about their own enthusiasm for an electronic calculating machine. ‘Our object,’ they wrote, ‘in inquiring into the nature and possibilities of this machine was to find out whether it, or any adaptation of it, was capable of being put to use in commercial offices, and if this was not the case, to try to stimulate the development of such a machine.’ They went on to list the functions a computer might be capable of performing: storing data and instructions, performing sequences of calculations on stored material automatically, comparing words or figures in its memory and reacting to differences, and printing out results. They emphasised the astonishing speed at which these functions could be carried out, but showed how it posed a problem whose solution would later become the first priority in the development of the Lyons computer. ‘It is obviously wasteful to have a machine that is capable of working at these superhuman speeds,’ they wrote, ‘unless the information it is to work upon can be made available to it at relatively comparable speeds. The feeding clearly cannot be directly by clerks but mechanical and electrical means have been developed that are satisfactory.’

Thompson and Standingford recognised that what might be ‘satisfactory’ for a computer working on mathematical problems that might require minutes or hours of computation would not do in an office, ‘where the problem is to carry out a large number of simple operations’. This note of realism continued in an account of the importance of punching every input tape twice, using a device that compared the first and second versions to eliminate errors. The authors had clearly absorbed the philosophy that time on the computer was valuable, and everything possible had to be done to make sure that it was used efficiently.

After giving a short summary of the memory devices then under development, and an account of how a computer actually worked, Thompson and Standingford went on to suggest three examples of its applications in the office: sales invoicing, the typing of form letters and payroll. In each case, they explained, permanent information such as customers’ code numbers and addresses or employees’ names and rates of pay could be stored on magnetic wire or teleprinter tape and used again and again, while each week another input tape or wire would be prepared, giving hours worked, bonuses and so on. These two, together with an ‘instruction wire’ containing the program, would be played into the computer’s memory, the necessary calculation performed, and the computer would then print automatically the invoices, letters or payslips required.

Although almost all of their informants had been preoccupied with computers as mathematical tools, Thompson and Standingford were able to use their own background in systems research at Lyons to see how clerical tasks with rather little mathematical content, such as word processing and payroll management, could be recast as ‘calculations’ for the computer. It was a lateral step that hardly anyone, with the possible exceptions of Eckert and Mauchly and Edmund C. Berkeley at Prudential Insurance, had yet taken. All that now remained was to convince Simmons and the Lyons board that this was the way they should go in the future.

3 Made in Britain (#ulink_15748789-9b2f-593c-96db-c9a3d88e31d9)

It was predictable that Simmons and his colleagues should look to the United States for advances in technology, including computers. Its vast markets, coupled with a native enthusiasm for innovation, provided a fertile breeding ground for ideas and their commercial development. They did not know at that stage that the history of computing also owed much to British pioneers.

Charles Babbage (1792–1871), a showman as much as a thinker, had been in the forefront of the enthusiasm for scientific discovery and technological invention that ignited elements of London society in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. Although he had held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge for a number of years, he had spent very little time there. He was interested in everything, but his greatest concern was to subject the problems of society to scientific and preferably numerical analysis. He developed a passionate interest in factory management, and the studies he carried out predated by almost a century the ‘time and motion’ craze of the 1920s and 1930s. For example, in his 1832 book On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures he published figures on the numbers of men, women and children needed to make pins, the time taken for each part of the process and the cost of each pin, taking into account labour and materials.

Writing of his search for laws and principles governing factory work, he commented: ‘Having been inclined during the last ten years to visit a considerable number of workshops and factories, both in England and on the Continent, for the purpose of making myself acquainted with the various resources of the mechanical art, I was insensibly led to apply to them those principles of generalisation to which my other pursuits had naturally given rise.’ From his observations he developed a poor opinion of the ability of the human species to undertake any repetitive work reliably. ‘One of the great advantages which we may derive from machinery,’ he said, ‘is from the check which it affords against the inattention of, the idleness or the dishonesty of human agents.’

The Industrial Revolution was in full swing. Machines spun and wove in factories at speeds unmatched by traditional cottage industry. Babbage the mathematician began to wonder if a machine could be made to do calculations. The best approach, he soon realised, was to reduce the calculation to a series of simpler stages, so that all the machine had to do was add and subtract. He owed this insight to the French mathematician Gaspard Riche de Prony, who had been charged with finding a feasible way to calculate all the new mathematical tables that would be needed following the introduction of the metric system by the French revolutionary government. De Prony’s solution was to organise a hierarchy of mathematical workers, beginning with a few professional mathematicians at the top and ending with a large team, who could add and subtract according to a formula worked out by those higher up the ladder. (The lowest tier was composed of redundant hairdressers, whose former customers had either lost their hair along with their heads, or prudently adopted a style of suitably radical simplicity.)

Babbage was convinced that anything a roomful of hairdressers could do, a machine could do better. He drew up designs for what he called his Difference Engine, and eventually persuaded the government to part with funds for its development. He got as far as producing a demonstration model that he displayed to wondering visitors in his London drawing room. It consisted of dozens of interconnected brass cogs with complex gears between them, which would perform predetermined (and apparently ‘miraculous’) procedures as he cranked a handle. The money ran out before he could produce a full-scale version. His design was vindicated when in 1991 curators at the Science Museum in London used his notes and drawings to produce his improved Difference Engine No. 2. Doron Swade, who led the project, tells the whole story in his book The Cogwheel Brain.

Money was not the only problem. Babbage had sidetracked himself by thinking up an even better machine: the Analytical Engine. Rather than setting up a calculation by positioning various cogs by hand, Babbage proposed to feed the Analytical Engine both program and data on punched cards such as those the French inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard had developed to automate the weaving of damask patterns into cloth. The machine never progressed beyond the design stage (although the design notes filled thirty volumes). But it encompassed much of the thinking behind the design of modern electronic computers: it had inputs, in the form of punched cards, a store or memory, a processing unit (which Babbage called the ‘mill’), and a variety of different outputs, including printed results or more card-punching.

The Analytical Engine also inspired a historic document, all the more remarkable in its day because the author was a woman. The document was entitled ‘Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq.’ and published in Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs in September 1843. The ‘Sketch’ was originally written in French by the Italian engineer Luigi Menabrea. The English translation in the Memoirs, with the addition of extensive explanatory ‘Notes’, was by Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace, and only product of the short-lived marriage between the poet Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke. Ada Lovelace, who was twenty-eight years old and a mother of three when the ‘Sketch’ was published, developed a passion for mathematical ideas at an early age. With all the emotional volatility of her father – although a cruelly restricted upbringing could have had as much to do with this as genetics – her own assessment of her mathematical gifts was sometimes unrealistic. But she formed a strong intellectual bond with Babbage, and proved an able advocate of his work. Her ‘Notes’ constitute the first accessible description of the capabilities and limitations of a computer. And a century before the sensational ‘electronic brain’ articles began to appear in the British and American press, she knew better than to oversell the discovery. ‘It is desirable,’ she wrote, ‘to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine … The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform … Its province is to assist us in making available, what we are already acquainted with’ (her italics). Today, when commentators frequently speculate that machine intelligence is on the verge of taking over from the human variety, her remark seems as percipient as ever.