Anonymous internal Lyons memo describing admin and charges involved in use of LEO to make calculations.

Transcript :

TERMS ON WHICH LEO CALCULATIONS ARE CARRIED OUT 

1. It is understood that all programmes will be drawn up in all respects to our satisfaction so as to provide adequate safeguards for accuracy in operation. 

2. The charge for the calculator time is at the rate of £50 per hour. 

No charge will be made for any time in which, on account of any defect in or breakdown of the calculator, useful work is not produced. A charge will be made, however, for the time taken by the calculator on the initial trials of any programme or the trials of modifications to a programme and on running the programme with test data so as to ensure that correct results are being produced. 

3. For the services of our programmers in programming or in advising on programmes or the trial of programmes the charge will be at the rate of £2 per man-hour. 

Once a programme has been approved no charge will be made for any time spent by the programmer in watching the operation of the programme or controlling the calculator. 

4. In the event of our being required to perforate programme or data tapes the charge willill be at the rate of 10/- per hour. 

5. It is assumed that the client will be responsible for giving final agreement that a programme produces satisfactory results . Thereafter any time spent on the calculator using the programme will be charged even if the agreed programme should prove to be unsatisfactory in some respect. Such time would include reasonable time spent in trying to discover why a programme failed and, should a fault in a programme lead us to suspect a fault in the calculator, any reasonable time spent in testing the calculator to make sure there was no such fault would also be chargeable. 

6. On the other hand we take responsibility for ensuring the accuracy of the calculations; should any inconsistency appear in the results we will undertake to repeat the calculutions. The test data agreed with the client's representatives will be fed to the calculator and the results of the test agreed with the known answers before proceeding with each set of the calculations; after the completion of a set test data will again be fed to the calculator and only if the results of the test agree with the known answers shall we regard the calculations of the set as satisfactory. 


30.11.54 

Provenance :
Collected by Peter Bird as part of his research for his book LEO - The First Business Computer (1994).