The Telegraph has a nice story about how How a chain of tea shops kickstarted the computer age (Christopher Williams, Nov. 10, 2011.) The story is about the 60th anniversary of the LEO which could be considered the first business computer. LEO was developed by the catering company J Lyons and Co which operated tea shops.
We came across an article in the Globe and Mail from Sept. 16, 1955, “Britain Leads in Office Automation” that talks about Ferranti and Leo. The article mentions that they and others “have not experienced much, if any, labour antagonism.” Automation putting people out of work was a major issue in those early years.
The Telegraph story sent me to a YouTube video of a BBC broadcast on the LEO that goes into fascinating detail about how it is “programmed” in hardware. They go from design to hardware as this is not a general purpose system that can be programmed in software.