1910–1997
Role: LEO design team
Responsibility: Technical expert in LEO design team
Ernie Lenaerts initially took a clerical job at J Lyons in the 1920s, but after training as a wireless mechanic in the RAF and progressing to radio counter-measures, he returned to Lyons as a radio mechanic working on microwave technology. Loaned to Cambridge to help in the design of the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) computer system, he returned to join John Pinkerton on the LEO design team after the success of EDSAC.
He wrote many technical papers and played a key role in constructing LEO and ensuring that fragile computers full of thermionic valves could be sufficiently reliable to be useful. He later worked on research including using speech recognition as a computer interface. A detailed account of his work on LEO can be found in his notebooks.
Biographies – The Centre of Computing History, Computer Conservation Society Issue 17 1997