[SIGCIS-Members] Simon Lavington

[Brian E Carpenter]

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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