Article in the West London Observer, 19th February 1954, about LEO I.

Transcript :

Introducing ‘LEO’
Lyons unveiled the 1st all-purpose electric office in the world

Less than one hour to calculate and record the wages of 1700 men both individually and collectively; invoicing and cost accounting in a mere fraction of the time normally taken by human methods.

Achievements like this are now a regular feature at Cadby Jall where J. Lyons and Co. have developed, on their own account, the first all-purpose commercial electronic high speed calculator ever built anywhere in the world.

LEO, as it is called (the name comes from the initials of Lyons Electronic Office) is not just another electronic “brain”. It is basically an electronic calculator, but means have been perfected of feeding the machine with information as fast as it can absorb it and at the other end of recording results in printed form just as fast as the machine can produce them.

Any commercial office work involving repetitive calculation is within the scope of LEO, and certainly the clerks at Cadby Hall can now look forward to a new era, free from arithmetical drudgery, in which they will be concerned with the far more interesting task of interpreting figures rather than with the monotonous job of producing them.

It has taken Lyons six years of research and development to perfect LEO and the versatility of the machine has surprised even its designers.