Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The post-war period also saw the start of the commercial com-
puter industry. Initially its customers were, unsurprisingly, the
government and the military. The first computers were vast assem-
blages, occupying whole rooms, weighing sometimes hundreds of
tons, and costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were also
hard to use and prone to breakdown. Furthermore it was hard to see
what uses such machines might have beyond specialized scientific
applications. Therefore most, though not all, of the computing
machines produced after the War were intended either for military
or governmental administrative use, while only a few were meant for
business ends, mostly to do with accounting. In general such
machines were thought of as large, clever calculators. That they
might be put to uses other than crunching numbers was not yet
obvious. There was a general perception immediately after the War
that there was never going to be a large market for such machines.
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Nevertheless the end of the War saw the beginnings of such
a market. In Britain Ferranti developed the Manchester Mk
as
a commercial computer, while the catering firm J. Lyons & Co.
commissioned the Lyons Electronic Organizer, or LEO (illus.
1
),
from the designers of an early experimental machine in Cambridge,
to help with their inventories and distribution, and which they sub-
sequently marketed as one of the first business computers. Despite
these and other developments the post-war computer industry in
Britain did not prosper, while it barely existed in Continental
Europe. According to Kenneth Flamm this was because of a failure
of the British and other European governments to make adequate
funds available to support research and development in the elec-
tronics, and a reluctance to see how such technology might find
military and governmental applications.
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Across the Atlantic the
situation was very different. The War, which had left European
economies and infrastructures devastated, had, through military
build up and spending catapulted the United States out of its pre-
war economic depression, and to the brink of the longest economic
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