Celebrating LEO, the world’s first business computer

Watched this during a coding break, so only half of my mind was actually paying attention. At some point, a friendly looking grandma appear and say something like "we had only 2k to work with". My attention shifted imediately, and I said out loud: "Wait...what?", and moved the seek slider back to actually read her name and position.

What a beautiful moment. It is indeed easy to forget the work of the pioneers, and we need indeed to document and spread their stories to the new generations.

There's an interesting book about this that came out a few years ago, "A Computer Called Leo". Not available as an ebook, unfortunately, but it's on Amazon.com[1] (for crazy money), or Amazon.co.uk[2] (for a more sensible price). I think Americans can still order from Amazon.co.uk, it just takes longer to arrive.

There's also a not-too-trolly (it's from 2003) Slashdot discussion at http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/03/05/02/1621204/a-comput... .

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Called-Leo-P-S/dp/1841151866 [2] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Computer-Called-LEO-worlds-computer/...

Thanks for that, I'd never head of LEO before. Those brits sure liked their mechanical computers, didn't they? With Babbage, Bletchley Park and LEO in their shared history, I'd half expect to open a Acorn micro and find pistons.

We need more of this kind of thing, capturing the remembrances of the industry trailblazers, before it's too late.