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<p>Dear SIGCIS</p>
<p><a moz-do-not-send="true" href="https://www.facebook.com/TNMOC/videos/it-is-with-great-sadness-that-the-national-museum-of-computing-tnmoc-announces-t/1171186234917349/">The
death was announced last week</a> of Professor Simon Lavington,
one of the earliest and most prolific of British computer
historians. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>His first book, the short illustrated study <i>A History of
Manchester Computers</i> (1975; 2nd ed., 1998), was followed by <i>Early
British Computers </i>(1980), a technical survey of the
hardware industry's development; <i>The Pegasus Story</i> (2000),
a machine history; and two detailed studies of British
manufacturers, <i>Moving Targets: Elliott-Automation and the Dawn
of the Computer Age </i>(2011) and <i>Early Computing in
Britain: Ferranti Ltd and Government Funding</i> (2019). He also
edited the multi-authored work <i>Alan Turing and his
Contemporaries</i> (2012, with Chris Burton, Martin
Campbell-Kelly and Roger Johnson). </p>
<p>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 (<i>Annals</i>, 2006: <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2006.34">doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2006.34</a>)
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 (<i>Computer Journal</i>,
2009: <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="https://doi.org/10.1093/comjnl/bxn019">doi.org/10.1093/comjnl/bxn019</a>). </p>
<p>He was also the digital archivist for the Computer Conservation
Society, where he co-ordinated the <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="https://www.ourcomputerheritage.org/">Our Computer
Heritage</a> 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. <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/fcb6b66a-adc2-38f1-a409-0bc692de76f0?component=2f1282d0-2e2a-38ea-a320-00085dfe9aa4">His
papers</a> are held at the University of Manchester Library. </p>
<p>Best wishes<br>
James</p>
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