Abstract: Paul Dixon, a refugee from Czechoslovakia (Prague) in 1947, graduated from Manchester University with an honours degree in Economics and Politics. Intrigued by an advertisement for programmers, applied, was interviewed by Peter Hermon and joined LEO Computers as a programmer. Although only with LEO for two years had a rapid rise ranging over a range of applications. Joined Roger Coleman at LEO II customer Ilford’s. Emigrated to Canada and later the USA for a career in computing, including very senior, and prominent positions with major companies.

Transcript :

LEO COMPUTERS LIMITED  -  Oral History Project
Interview with Paul Dixon by Michael Storey 

This interview of Paul Dixon has being recorded by the LEO Computer Society of, as part of an Oral History Project to document the earliest use of electronic computers in business applications.  Any opinions expressed are those of the interviewee and not of the Society.  Copyright and any other intellectual property rights of this interview in recorded form and in any transcription thereof remains with the LEO Computer Society 2016.  Thank you. 

[Paul Dixon]:  I was born in Prague in what was then Czechoslovakia on September 29th, 1928. So this year I will be 88  And much to my surprise I can still think and talk and do things which I didn't expect to do at this age when I was younger.

 I went to school in Prague First elementary school and then in high school which in the Czechoslovakia was called a gymnázium.  It's like high school here because when you graduate from it you can go to any university, technical or general, which you choose.

The Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, and when I was in the fourth year at the gymnázium and since I am half Jewish, I was promptly kicked out of school.  They didn't allow  people who were eventually destined for concentration camp to get an education.  After the end of the war when it became normal Czechoslovakia again, I completed high school. I did five years in two years to catch up.

Anyway, I did get my matriculation and all that.  Then there was a little hiatus because my mother sent me to England to something called The College for Czech Students created by the British Council and by the Czech Foreign Minister.  It took about eighty students and it essentially  taught us how to speak, read and write English and a bit of English history. At the end of it we were knowledgeable about England,  I went there in October 1947.

  In February 1948 the Communist coup d’état established the communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia and consequently I stayed in England as a refugee. The college was abolished by the Communist Government by June 1948, so in June 1948 I got a pound and a ticket to go to Liverpool to start work as an office boy for Dunlop Rubber Company -In the footwear sales division.

 And then I was suddenly very rich, they paid me three pounds, ten shillings a week, less insurance and tax.  By the time I paid the landlady and buses to go to work if I was lucky I had five shillings left at the end of the week.

[Michael Storey]: Five shillings was still a fair bit of money in the late forties’.

[Paul Dixon]: You know, that, it would probably have enabled me, if I sustained, to buy one shirt a year or something.  

I stayed with Dunlop but then I got my mother to send me all the documentation I needed to apply for a place at a university and applied for a place at Manchester University. I was accepted to the honours School of Economics and Political Science and was very fortunate to receive from the British Government, Czech Refugee Trust Fund a scholarship to do this.  So I was educated and I got my degree, an honours degree, in Economics and Political Science, beautifully paid for by the British Government.  I followed up by registering for a Masters degree at Manchester University

[Michael Storey]:  When did you first hear about LEO?

[Paul Dixon]:  I was half way through my research studentship for a Masters when I came across an ad in the London Times. In those days they used to have them on the front page. One advertised for programmers and trainees, no experience necessary.  I wrote a very short, hand written, letter and I got an interview.  And that's how I, for the first time, heard about computers and LEO.

I read a book written by some professor in those days, I've forgot the name of it by now, which told me at least what a computer was and what programming was and I think that helped me during my interview with Peter Hermon to get hired.  

I moved to London from Manchester for what was my first job - as a trainee programme.  I waited about a month doing work like doing, checking flow charts and things like that until the programming course started and I was off.

[Michael Storey]: So were you involved with LEO I or LEO II?

[Paul Dixon]:  Only LEO I.  When I went there in ’55 and early ’56 LEO II didn't exist as a reality, it existed as an idea more than anything.  And the reality at that time was LEO I. So I learned to program LEO I, and I have written quite a few programs over two years for LEO I which were commercially viable for insurance companies and The Institute of Actuaries and, and people like that. It was on the Lyons machine at Cadby Hall. That was the only LEO in existence. It principally did Lyons work but it was also used to sell the idea of using computers to other people - it was used for marketing. 

By the time I got there Frank Land has finished the tea blending job (Ed: L4) and I think we also did, by then, the steel company payroll. And we were in the process of selling or sold Imperial Tobacco a LEO II computer. We were acting as a service bureau pretty much for various insurance companies because we knew how to program that type of application.

 At least I learned how to program LEO I though partly in preparation for future sales of LEO II, which were, of course, going to be LEO IIs. The LEO I was really used as a window into computing for future commercial sales of LEO II - to introduce people to LEO II.  The programming for LEO II was very similar to LEO I and for any LEO I programmer it was very easy to learn and move over to LEO II.

But I was mainly engaged writing programs for LEO I primarily for LEO I users who would then run it on LEO I at that time and pay for it. Now how much they paid for it I didn't know because I was a true, pure programmer, I knew zilch about marketing.   But it worked - I think it worked well because there were some LEO II sales which I'm sure wouldn't have happened if there were not LEO I.

Well I stayed working for LEO for two years.  I would have stayed longer, I loved the job and the job seemed to have loved me too, so that was a mutual love affair.  And, but then my boss (Ed: Roger Coleman,)  moved to Ilford Limited (Ed: LEO II/9 1960), the film people, as a head of their system, as head of data processing, and he brought me shortly over as head of systems and programming.

What happened is that I moved there before there were any computers there.  So at the time I got to Ilford’s there was an order for a Stantec Zebra computer built by Standard Telephones and Cables.
 I was then sent to Newport to learn about the machine and all that and I quickly discovered that it was a nice piece of engineering, but basically useless for business processing. When we got talking with the programmers there and checking it out they basically agreed.  For example, I could do something on a business application in five LEO II instructions and there is no way I could do it in less than thirty two instructions on the Stantec Zebra. So the order was switched to a LEO II.

We did some work in preparation for programming major applications on LEO II, before the computer was even installed.  And I remember being heavily involved in an application which essentially would enable Ilford to forecast accurately demand for film despite the serious seasonal variations in the demand. Somehow we figured out how to do the arithmetic and the logic and even tested by hand against the previous real sales.  But I left before it got to be programmed.  

 I saw an ad from Ferranti-Packard in London asking for systems analysts and programmers to go to Canada and I thought that's interesting. To cut the story short, I interviewed with them and then by the end of 1959 I was emigrating with my new wife to Canada. I worked at Ferranti-Packard before it was sold to ICL.

At the time I went there they had just delivered and made to work at Air Canada their first, and one-off, computer used for their airline reservation system.  But at the time I got there it was agreed to continue development of the computer system and we developed the successor for it. There was a young chap who was a very good programmer and analyst who later became the head and owner of Ian Sharp Associates who provided service, bureau type services using APL, A Programming Language.

There was me from LEO and Ian Sharp. We put our heads together and evolved the design of the Ferranti-Packard 6000, making sure that it did everything LEO I and II could do, plus whatever new things we could include.  Then I spent my time working for and with the head of research and development, Mr Taylor, who was well known for his patents in the television area, among other things.

While with Ferranti-Packard for a couple of years, or more, we sold a system to Toronto Stock Exchange and we sold another one to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for cheque sorting. It was the first computer driven cheque sorting system.  And we almost sold a marshalling yard automation system, but the Canadian National Railways over spent so much on the physical yard that they then had no money to buy the system to run it.  

About that time somewhere at a conference I went to I met, of all people, ex LEO Head of Programming John Gosden, who, at that time was working for Auerbach Corporation, which was a consulting company. He was developing the EDP’s Standard Reports. He just sort of persuaded me to join him at Auerbach Corporation.  At that time the Ferranti-Packard was being sold to ICL and none of us knew what the future was. We had a very nice computer, but didn't know what to do. We seemed to be doing okay with marketing it and then delivering.  But the Managing Director of Ferranti-Packard in Canada managed the company as a transformer company making and selling transformers business and didn't seem to be terribly interested in doing what was necessary to be in the computer business.  So I joined Auerbach Corporation in 1962 and worked essentially as an assistant consultant.  Most of the applications which I worked on were with the Government, with the Air Force, and I thrived there, as did John Gosden. And fairly quickly I became the manager of the head office consulting group. 

As happens sometimes one of the consulting assignments was with the president of Massey Ferguson and I was brought in to teach him what computers were about and how to manage them and what to manage them for in a large global corporation. At that time they employed about sixty thousand people around the world.   And so I went from a small systems consultant company to be the head of systems for Massey Ferguson worldwide, and stayed there for twelve years as the head of systems and for one year then as Managing Director of Business Development. I was one of the early people who reported directly to the President of MF in this kind of capacity - unusual in the sixties and seventies.

[Michael Storey]: In the sixties and seventies computers were still relatively in their infancy?

[Paul Dixon]: Yes: when I joined Massey Ferguson they just had around the world a scattering of little IBM computer.  My position was a kind of a development job at another level. Unfortunately the board of directors totally screwed up Massey Ferguson financially and that then led to the collapse of the company. Much of it was sold in bits and pieces and what was left was bought by somebody who continued the brand name and I think continued making tractors in England, France and I think India, but I'm not sure about that.

It so happened that at about the time my job was collapsing around my ears, I got a call from a headhunter from New York, and I got a job as Vice President Processing of Systems and for Warner Communications. I discovered after I joined the company and then started working there that culturally I put myself into a situation where I was a square peg in a round hole.   Then Warner at that time got into difficulties with Atari. They had developed Atari and the games which went with it, Pac-Man and all that, and it was such a huge marketing success that they extended manufacturing to Hong Kong and in Ireland. Warner was a marvellous communications and movie company: they were fantastic with the artists and celebrities and movie making, but for the new products they monitored the sales through the supply chain, all the way to the retailer, but they did not manage and monitor effectively the sales via retailers to individually customers.  And, unbeknownst to them they stuffed the supply chain without knowing that no longer was it being taken up by individual buyers. From marvellous sales they went abruptly to virtually no sales from retail stock.  

 During this period of time the whole thing started shrinking and, from what I remember, Warner Communications, from the Forbes List of the of twenty best managed companies in the country was suddenly being listed in the twenty worst managed  As it started shrinking instead of developing something for the corporation I had to start firing people.  And I only lasted about two, two and a half years in this job and then I got fired and then I started simply consulting on my own account.

From that point on I kept doing that until I did my last consulting assignment in the year 2000 ln Bangkok, and since then I have been basically retired.

[Michael Storey]: Did you come across LEO in your later life at all?  Did you have any association with it?

[Paul Dixon]: Other than, being in good contact with friends including John Gosden.  I just stayed with Massey Ferguson for about thirteen years.  And I remember that when I first came there and was sat in my corporate office, I sort of looked around me and said ‘now what do I do?’  I thought if I am still in this job in a year’s time that would be a great success’. I didn't expect to stay there for thirteen.  And so, and by the time I left for Warner Communication, by the time I left Massey Ferguson, there was no chance of reconnecting with LEO. You know, it was gone.  Whatever happened and its eventual merger or absorption into ICL, I remember thinking, ‘well if they didn't have the sense to base their development of future computing strategy on LEO III, then they're not going to last very long’.

 One thing I would like to add, I think that what happened fairly early in the LEO saga. At one time IBM or somebody developed COBOL, Common Business Oriented Language, which took off like wild fire. LEO, particular for LEO III,  not only developed an excellent language of our own CLEO (Clear Language for Expressing Orders)  which didn't take off like wild fire because it really wasn't designed, intended to work on other computers like the IBM range. Further we didn't develop COBOL for LEO III to go with it.  I think in terms of marketing and, and future systems of it, that was one of the basic strategic mistakes.

[Michael Storey]: I'm not sure it would have made any difference in the final analysis because...

[Paul Dixon]: It would have taken longer to go down.

[Michael Storey]: This interview with Paul has been recorded by the LEO Computer Society and the Society would like to thank Paul very much for his time and his reminiscences.  The interview and the transcript form part of an Oral History Project to document the early use of electronic computers in business and other applications, but particularly in business.  Any opinions expressed are those of the interviewee, that is Paul, and not the Society.  The copyright of this interview, in recorded form and in transcript, remain the property of the LEO Computer Society 2016.  Thank you very much Paul.  Thank you.

[Paul Dixon]: And thank you
[End]

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