25th May 2022

Time is marching on and we’re now in the final year of our lottery-funded project, Swiss Rolls, Tea and the Electronic Office!

The first of the key deliverables of the project came to fruition in November 2021 in the form of a new documentary film about the history of LEO, launched to coincide with the 70th anniversary of when LEO I first started actively and regularly producing work that added value to the J. Lyons business. On that significant anniversary it was extremely gratifying to see how well our film was received by everyone who watched it. Viewers have contacted us from around the world - from Australia to Germany to South Africa and Canada - to congratulate us on the high quality of the film.

It continues to be available on YouTube and it is still actively being circulated to contacts, colleagues and conferences around the globe, spreading the story of LEO as it goes.

At the same time we’ve also been forging ahead with cataloguing and digitising the LEO archive that is at the centre of the project and we now have over 11,000 digitised LEO-related pages available on the CCH website. Luke Thorne, our dedicated project archivist, is currently cataloguing and making available the remainder of the photographs in the collection.

As project Manager I feel strongly that having such good quality archival evidence about LEO’s contribution to computing history in the form of photographs, historical film footage, and documents, along with having access to the memories of the LEO pioneers, contributed hugely to the quality and success of our film. I can’t express sufficient thanks to everyone who has been involved over the years in collecting the LEO memorabilia that forms the archive as well as to all involved in producing the film.

As for progress on the virtual reality LEO I, one of the most exciting parts of the project, a fascinating video update was produced by Richard Monk in May 2022 that illustrates just how powerful this will be in telling the LEO story. 

The level of detail being portrayed in the 3D models and the freedom the system has to tell a huge range of individual stories in a really original way, and to link to material in the archive, is remarkable and this whole strand of our project is incredibly exciting for CCH to be doing. 

We will be undertaking the first round of user testing on the system at CCH later this year – watch this space!

We’re also about to start work on what will be the final deliverable of the project, a suite of learning resources around LEO for schools and parents to use. We’re looking forward to developing these as we think there will be some unique resources amongst them, as we’ll be able to use items from the archive, memories and reminiscences from the pioneers, interview footage from the film (including some that didn’t make the final cut!) and even some of the 3D assets from the virtual LEO I. So once again, watch this space.

And finally, to offer up some statistics on our achievements at the end of the second year of the delivery phase of the project:

But there’s still lots to do!