LCS Newsletter from November 2011. The editor is unidentified.

Transcript :

LEO COMPUTERS SOCIETY       NEWSLETTER  November 2011

1. David Tresman Caminer Scholarship.
 The David Tresman Caminer Scholarship, honouring the memory of David Caminer, has been established at Middlesex University and the first recipient has recently been announced as Zehra Abbas. She will be studying for a MSc in Business  Information Systems Management.  See the LEO website for further details. 
http://www.leo-computers.org.uk/dtcscholarship.htm


2. Oral History project.
 This project, funded by a generous donation from the AIT Trust, is getting under way with the aim of audio recording the recollections of those surviving members who worked for Lyons/LEO in the early days of the company's development. A digital voice recorder has been purchased and members of the Society are carrying out the interviews. To date Tony Morgan has recorded Alan King's oral history and Martin Garthwaite, a graduate student at University College, who is doing a dissertation on the development of the LEO computer, is helping and has taken the oral history of Ralph Land . Frank Land has developed a format for the interviews, which is available for the interviewers to follow.   In most cases members will be contacted and invited to participate in the project.   However, if you are not contacted and feel that you have particular memories worth recording for posterity please contact Gloria Guy on [Personal data removed].
 
The audio recordings and transcriptions are intended to be archived either at the Science Museum or at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. The British Library already holds interviews by Frank Land and Mary Coombs and may also hold our recordings. We are hoping to include Internet access to the archive.

In the meantime Google (see below) have taken Video Interviews of Ernest Kaye, Mary Coombs, Ralph Land and Frank Land.  Ray Shaw may be added to the Google list.  The current plan is that these video interviews will be made available to The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) at Bletchley Park who will show them in a gallery where videos of computer pioneers will be available for viewing.

3. McTaggart Lecture.
The 2011 McTaggart Lecture to the Television Industry was given by Erik Schmidt, CEO of Google.  In the course of his lecture he went out of his way to note the pioneering work done in this country on many aspects of computing and noted in particular the role played by Lyons and LEO in establishing business computing.  The lecture and his remarks about LEO were widely reported in the press.  Subsequently Google UK, (see below) have been notably supportive of the LEO Computers Society.

4. LEO 1 Anniversary.
 17th November 2011 marks the 60th Anniversary of the first live run of the Lyons Bakery Valuations job on LEO 1, the world's first commercial application.    A media event took place on November 11th at the Science Museum to publicise this and LEO's importance in the development of computing.  The event was organised by John Aeberhard and was supported by Google who have compiled an audio/video presentation of the occasion, which was attended by some dozen journalists including Rory Cellan-Jones (BBC) and Lawrence McGinty (ITV). 

 Google has pulled many of the Media’s reports of this anniversary together at this link   
      http://storify.com/lynetter/leo-60th-anniversary

Google has also given LEO the benefit of an entry on its official Blog site thus raising the LEO profile worldwide. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/celebrating-leo-worlds-first-business.html
                                 

5. 2012 Reunion.
            The next reunion will take place on Sunday 22nd April and full details will be issued in February 2012.  Please note the date in your diary.
The Venue is the same as for the 2010 reunion but the hotel has been renamed and is now the "Doubletree by Hilton" in Southampton Row, London.

6. Memorabilia.
We are still collection LEO memorabilia, both hardware and documentation.  If you have any memorabilia that you would be willing to lodge in the LEO archives, please let a member of the committee know.   The paper archive is held at the Archives of Manchester University and may be accessed by prior appointment.   Hardware items are at TNMOC at Bletchley Park.

7. The Committee.
    The members of the committee are currently 
        Chairman: Peter Byford [Personal data removed]  
        Secretary: John Hall [Personal data removed] 
        John Daines: [Personal data removed] 
        Gloria Guy: [Personal data removed] 
        Ray Hennessy: [Personal data removed] 

  If you would like to help on the committee, be willing to carry out interviews of LEO people in your area or have any suggestions that might help the Society please contact us. We are also looking for people who might be able to help with the website and people who might be able to help with cataloguing/recording  the LEO artefacts held in the various museums and repositories around the World.

Provenance :
Donated to the LCS archive by Peter Byford.