1924–2000
Role: First LEO programmer
Responsibility: Wrote first payroll program
Arriving in England from Czechoslovakia on a children’s transport in June 1939, Leo served in the RAF and joined J. Lyons & Co. in March 1949 as a trainee. In 1950, he joined the LEO team as a Trainee Programmer, a mere 10 years after arriving in the UK with no knowledge of English. Fanti wrote test programs for the LEO engineers and worked with the Met Office to produce early programs for computerised weather forecasting. A keen photographer, Fanti was behind many of the surviving images of the LEO team.
Biographies – Computing History