[SIGCIS-Members] Simon Lavington

[James Cortada]

Such sad news.  For those of us starting to explore "computer history" as
it was known in the 1970s and 1980s, he was one of few doing so.  He was,
therefore, a mentor by example.  My readings on computing's history
involved him, Martin Campbell-Kelly (so Martin not trying to age you as *an
ancient*), and Bill aspray, among a half dozen folks.  The earliest
historians started out in some other field, eg I in sales, Martin was in
computing, Bill although a PhD in history focused on mathematics which
helped enormously when writing his biography of Von Neumann.  Simon wrote
well and clearly, at least who knew Zero when I came into the IT industry
in 1974 (My history PhD was in modern European political history).  So, I
will always be grateful for Simon providing a glide path into this strange
new history.

Jim Cortada

On Fri, Oct 24, 2025 at 12:24 PM James Sumner via Members <
members at lists.sigcis.org> 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) 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).
>
> 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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-- 
James W. Cortada
Senior Research Fellow
Charles Babbage Institute
University of Minnesota
jcortada at umn.edu
608-274-6382
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