1934–2017
Role: Director of Lyons Informations Systems
Responsibility: Senior manager and first LEO historian
Peter Bird was a senior manager within the Lyons who went on to become the first historian of the LEO computer system, publishing ‘LEO, The First Business Computer’. His work collating early images of the machine and the people who created it helped to immortalise this one-off moment in history, and a huge number of the images of LEO and its creators that survive today do so due to Bird’s careful work.
Bird had worked as a navigating officer in the Merchant Navy, joining J. Lyons & Co. in 1964, where he held a number of senior management posts, including Information Technology Consultant and Director of Systems Development at Head Office. Bird became Director of Lyons Information Systems Ltd in 1981.
Biographies – The Guardian, LEO Computers Society, The Centre of Computing History