LEO III
In the 1940s, there were two main schools of practical research into computers: there was the military camp, designing hardware for applications such as ballistics research, military cryptography, and planning the movements of men and machines across a newly imagined notional cold-war battlefield; and then there was the confectionery, baked-goods and frozen deserts camp, which recognised the tremendous potential of these new electronic brains for improving the effectiveness of our tasty tea-time treats. LEO--Lyon's Electronic Office--falls into the latter of these two camps.
In the fantastic new Museum of London galleries they have both a later-model LEO III, as used by the stock-jobbing firm of Wedd Durlacher Mordaunt and Co, and a recreation of the window from the Lyon's Corner House on Coventry Street, filled with Vorticist-styled "Lyon's Petits Fours" tins and the like. Both exhibits are in separate parts of the gallery--one in an area looking at how technology and new media have changed working London, the other looking at modernity in everyday London life in the 1920s.
But the breakneck journey towards the Lord Mayor's Carriage and the gift shop leaves us no opportunity to ask or to answer the big questions. How did Lyon's come to have it's fingers in so many pies (beyond their once-famous Individual Fruit Pies--boom boom!)?
LEO III
In the 1940s, there were two main schools of practical research into computers: there was the military camp, designing hardware for applications such as ballistics research, military cryptography, and planning the movements of men and machines across a newly imagined notional cold-war battlefield; and then there was the confectionery, baked-goods and frozen deserts camp, which recognised the tremendous potential of these new electronic brains for improving the effectiveness of our tasty tea-time treats. LEO--Lyon's Electronic Office--falls into the latter of these two camps.
In the fantastic new Museum of London galleries they have both a later-model LEO III, as used by the stock-jobbing firm of Wedd Durlacher Mordaunt and Co, and a recreation of the window from the Lyon's Corner House on Coventry Street, filled with Vorticist-styled "Lyon's Petits Fours" tins and the like. Both exhibits are in separate parts of the gallery--one in an area looking at how technology and new media have changed working London, the other looking at modernity in everyday London life in the 1920s.
But the breakneck journey towards the Lord Mayor's Carriage and the gift shop leaves us no opportunity to ask or to answer the big questions. How did Lyon's come to have it's fingers in so many pies (beyond their once-famous Individual Fruit Pies--boom boom!)?