A company's routine calculations by hand · Ceded (since 1951)

LEO, the computer built by the caterer J. Lyons and Company, runs the firm's bakery valuations at Cadby Hall in London in November 1951, the first routine office work carried out by a computer.

What was ceded is the weekly grind of costing, valuing and paying, done until then by rooms of clerks with paper, ledgers and adding machines. Lyons put its own payroll on LEO soon afterwards and later sold the machine's time to other firms, including the Ford factory at Dagenham. The work did not become smaller, it became invisible: the same arithmetic now runs nightly and nobody reads it. What is not ceded is deciding what to count, what a figure means, and whether the result should change anything. A wrong total is still someone's fault.