[SIGCIS-Members] Simon Lavington

[Elisabetta Mori]

Dear SIGCIS,

I am preparing a short In Memoriam of Simon Lavington to be published in
the forthcoming issue of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.
If you have a nice short anecdote, a nice picture, or something you would
like to propose to remember Simon, please feel free to send it to me *by
January 6th 2026*.

Best wishes,
Elisabetta


Il giorno ven 24 ott 2025 alle ore 21:54 Brian E Carpenter via Members <
members at lists.sigcis.org> ha scritto:

> I just want to mention that Simon was my Ph.D. supervisor in Manchester,
> and I was his first Ph.D. student. That was before either of us had an
> interest in the history of computing, but it was a great pleasure to me
> that we stayed in touch over the years, and I am very saddened that he has
> left us. Until quite recently, he was working on a planned book about the
> earliest female British programmers (one of whom continued her career here
> in New Zealand).
>
> Regards/Ngā mihi
>     Brian Carpenter
>
> On 25-Oct-25 06:19, James Sumner via Members wrote:
> > Dear SIGCIS
> >
> > The death was announced last week <
> https://www.facebook.com/TNMOC/videos/it-is-with-great-sadness-that-the-national-museum-of-computing-tnmoc-announces-t/1171186234917349/> of
> Professor Simon Lavington, one of the earliest and most prolific of British
> computer historians.
> >
> > Originally trained as an electrical engineer, Simon Lavington was a
> graduate student in the University of Manchester's emerging Department of
> Computer Science under Tom Kilburn in the 1960s. His historical research,
> mostly in the internal machine-history tradition, developed alongside an
> academic career in computer science and systems design at Manchester and
> the University of Essex, and expanded after his official retirement in 2002.
> >
> > His first book, the short illustrated study /A History of Manchester
> Computers/ (1975; 2nd ed., 1998), was followed by /Early British Computers
> /(1980), a technical survey of the hardware industry's development; /The
> Pegasus Story/ (2000), a machine history; and two detailed studies of
> British manufacturers, /Moving Targets: Elliott-Automation and the Dawn of
> the Computer Age /(2011) and /Early Computing in Britain: Ferranti Ltd and
> Government Funding/ (2019). He also edited the multi-authored work /Alan
> Turing and his Contemporaries/ (2012, with Chris Burton, Martin
> Campbell-Kelly and Roger Johnson).
> >
> > His published articles include a description of the high-speed text
> analysis machine Oedipus, developed secretly for the intelligence service
> GCHQ in the 1950s and loosely descended from the Bletchley Park Colossus
> project (/Annals/, 2006: doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2006.34 <
> https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2006.34>) and a short biography of Dina
> Vaughan/St Johnston, whose company Vaughan Programming Services was a
> defining influence on the concept of the independent software house
> (/Computer Journal/, 2009: doi.org/10.1093/comjnl/bxn019 <
> https://doi.org/10.1093/comjnl/bxn019>).
> >
> > He was also the digital archivist for the Computer Conservation Society,
> where he co-ordinated the Our Computer Heritage <
> https://www.ourcomputerheritage.org/> project. In 2024 he was awarded an
> honorary fellowship of the National Museum of Computing, and he remained
> active in research and commemorative activities to the end of his life. His
> papers <
> https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/fcb6b66a-adc2-38f1-a409-0bc692de76f0?component=2f1282d0-2e2a-38ea-a320-00085dfe9aa4>
> are held at the University of Manchester Library.
> >
> > Best wishes
> > James
> >
> >
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