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@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
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
On 25-Oct-25 06:19, James Sumner via Members wrote: 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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