Fifty years on from a computer revolution

Computing was very much in its infancy. Manchester University made the first, Cambridge built one too – but a huge Government investment in 1957 kick-started academic computing, enabling state-of the-art factory-built machines to be installed at Leeds, Southampton, Newcastle, Oxford and London and Glasgow.

It was a huge risk, as Professor Roger Boyle, modern-day head of computing at the University of Leeds, explained: “They had no way of knowing if this was a good idea or not.”

The Leeds machine, Lucifer, cost £50,000 and was as far removed from the modern day laptop as could be imagined. It was installed in a disused Methodist Chapel on the edge of campus, where a new concrete floor was laid to take its weight and minimise vibration. “It was enormous,” Boyle explained. “They had to winch many of the components through the roof.”

“There were no transistors – it was all valves and glowing lights – and came with armies of personnel, who had to carry out a daily maintenance programme.” Sandy Douglas, who had worked on the Cambridge computer, was recruited to head up the team.

Programming was done by paper tape. “They would feed the tape into the machine, wait while it thought about it, often for hours – and then the answer would be spat out on more paper tape.”

And though by modern standards its memory was tiny and its processing speed slow, Lucifer enabled Leeds researchers to make complex calculations far more quickly than was possible using pencils, paper and slide rules. “It could do 12-figure multiplications in a fraction of a second,” said Boyle. “This made it a really valuable tool for physicists and mathematicians. Our machine was also used by chemists who needed its power for their work in crystallography.”

Their time on it was very precious. “And if you were a user you had to understand exactly how it worked, and that was a profound technical skill. In the 1950s, if you were a computer user, you were among the University elite.”

Just as now, technology moved on apace. By 1960 Lucifer was given a major upgrade, and four years later it was replaced. Sadly, few of the original components survive, though an identical model is on display at the Science Museum in London.

And though it was soon obsolete, Boyle says that original investment led directly to an exponential growth in the use of computers in British Universities, and paved the way for 50 years of technological growth. “By the 1960s Leeds was offering PhDs and Masters degrees in computing and in the 1970s we were among the first universities to offer a single honours degree in the subject.”

At the time, our universities led the way in developing the skills for the burgeoning new industry. “Britain was right up there,” said Boyle, adding that it wasn’t until the late 1960s that the emergence of the American giants began to put Britain in the shade. “And even though our technical lead faltered, we are still ahead in some areas of theory and science.”

He admits that computer courses have suffered something of an image problem in recent years: “Computing is no longer seen as glamorous. 20 years ago it was rocket science, but now computers are just so much part of everyday life and it isn’t seen as such an exciting subject to study.

“That’s a shame, because the demand for our research and our graduates remains very high.” And Leeds remains a centre of excellence for computer science, artificial intelligence and informatics.

The University of Leeds is staging a major event to mark its computing jubilee on Friday March 30, when former staff and students, including some from the department’s pioneering early days, are returning to the campus. The year’s events will also include the award of an honorary doctorate of engineering to Emeritus Professor Tony Wren in recognition of his world-leading work on transport scheduling – work which began on Leeds’s original “brain machine”.

For more information

Professor Roger Boyle is available for interview. Contact via Simon Jenkins, University of Leeds press office, on +44 113 3435764, 07791 333229, email s.jenkins@leeds.ac.uk

Full details of the Leeds computing jubilee event can be found at www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/jubilee/