[SIGCIS-Members] Simon Lavington

[James Sumner]

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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