Founded in 1887, J. Lyons and Co. was a British restaurant chain, food manufacturing and hotel conglomerate. Going through a rough time in the crisis of the 1980s, the firm was practically sold off in 1994, and it now exists only in its successor companies. However, J. Lyons and Co. wrote a piece of ICT history on 17 November 1951 by running the first business application on a computer. The company played a pioneering role in computerising business life. Between 1951 and 1963 they manufactured and sold a range of LEO (Lyons Electronic Office,www.fcet.staffs.ac.uk/jdw1/sucfm/LEO.htm) computers (LEO I, II, III), with the last remaining machines still in use in 1981.

The legendary British EDSAC served as inspiration for the first LEO. Before development work commenced, senior officers from J. Lyons and Co. visited Cambridge, and met Douglas Hartree and Maurice Wilkes, builders of EDSAC. Lyons provided financial support to the EDSAC project after their visit, and Hartree and Wilkes recommended to them the engineer John Pinkerton (1919-1997), who was engaged in radar research in Cambridge. Pinkerton directed the building of LEO I that had a clock speed of 500 kHz, and executed most of instructions in 1.5 seconds. The programmes were written by Lyons’ engineer Derek Hemy, a former student of Wilkes’.

The first business application evaluated the performance of bakeries. The test run of the programme was done on 15 September 1951, and it was set in action a good two months later, on 17 November.