LEO, the first business computer

Recently  it was the 60th anniversary of LEO, the world’s first business computer—built by J.Lyons & Co, a leading British food manufacturer at the time that also ran a famous chain of tea shops.

Lyons management had long been keen to streamline their back-office operations. In 1947, two Lyons managers visited the U.S. to learn about the latest business processes, including whether the electronic computers they’d heard about during their wartime service, like ENIAC, might be useful. (At the time, the closer-to-home advances at Bletchley Park were still a well-kept military secret.)

They returned inspired by the possibilities and keen to build a machine of their own. After several years of development, LEO, a.k.a. Lyons Electronic Office, took on its first office job on November 17, 1951—weekly valuations for the bakery division, calculating margins on Lyon’s output of bread, cakes and pies.

Until LEO, computing in a work setting was treated like a specialist bit of kit on a factory production line. Each machine was dedicated to a single task. In essence, they were narrowly defined calculating machines. The vision for LEO, in contrast, was bravely broad. LEO was a single computer capable of handling a whole swathe of accounting and bookkeeping tasks, as well as producing daily management reports.

LEO was such a success that Lyons set up a commercial subsidiary to sell spare time on LEO to other businesses, including the Ford Motor Company, which used it to process the payroll for the thousands of workers at its U.K. plant. Later, Lyons also built entirely new LEOs and sold them to other blue-chip companies of the era. In total, more than 70 LEO’s were built, with the last remaining in service until the 1980’s (not bad for a computer that took up an entire room!).

Today we view IT as critical to any enterprise, but in the 1950s, this was by no means a given, as evidenced by a quote from a 1954 issue of The Economist: “There are those who do not believe in the desirability of introducing anything as esoteric as electronics into business routine.” Things certainly have changed, and in a sense, all modern day businesses owe a debt to the LEO team.

Drag and drop search for Go Daddy websites

Wouldn’t it be nice to just drag and drop a Custom Search box onto a website?

We thought so, and so did Go Daddy, the world’s largest domain name registrar and top web hosting provider. Website owners using Go Daddy’s WebSite Tonight product can now easily drag a search widget onto their web pages, and instantly turn on high-quality website search powered by the Custom Search platform.

WebSite Tonight is a do-it-yourself service that lets users create, design, update and publish websites without requiring any knowledge of HTML. The product offers 1,500+ design templates and enables users to very easily add widgets to their web pages. WebSite Tonight was named for its ease of use – users can create a website as quickly as one night.

Here’s how you add Custom Search to your website in WebSite Tonight:

Step 1: Select “Google Custom Search” from the list of available widgets


Step 2: Select a predefined search theme to match the style of your website

Step 3: Drag and drop the Google Custom Search box to the desired location on your website

Step 4: Search! Google search results appear within the Go Daddy website


Go Daddy also integrates with Google Webmaster Tools as part of the Google Services for Websites program. As Go Daddy automatically submits Sitemaps to Google, changes to websites are quickly discovered and indexed by Google’s crawlers, thereby improving search quality on both the individual website as well as Google.com.

Ease of use plus better performance — we like that combination. We hope you also like the concept of drag and drop search. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback.