GE's Appliance Park Still an IT Innovator

History books routinely describe the delivery of the Univac I to General Electric Co.'s Appliance Park in 1954 as the first installation of an electronic computer at a business.

But that "first" is only true in the U.S.

Three years earlier, a venerable British catering company—famous for its teas and cakes but with no electronics experience—had built its own computer and run the first routine office program.

The firm, J. Lyons and Co. in West London, had an intense interest in improved office-management techniques and wanted to see if the experimental computers being designed for mathematical work could be applied to the problems of business data processing.

The result was LEO, for Lyons Electronic Office, the first computer to run a payroll and the first to manage inventories, not to mention the first to calculate the most cost-effective blending time for fine, flavorful cups of tea.

The whole story of this user-driven innovation—the ultimate homegrown system—is told in the book, LEO: The Incredible Story of the World's First Business Computer (McGraw-Hill, 1998). It was written by several Lyons employees who actually worked on the project.

Even in the U.S., there were companies ahead of GE in line to get Univac computers, but the computers were never installed.

In 1948, A.C. Nielsen Co. and Prudential Insurance Co. agreed to buy Univacs from the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp., at the ludicrously low price of $150,000 each.

But when Remington Rand Inc. bought Eckert-Mauchly in 1950, it recognized the price was too low and eventually succeeded in canceling those contracts.