50 Years of Payroll

50 Years of Payroll - Impressions from a meeting of the Computer Conservation Society in London on Thursday 26 th February.

We expect regular computer produced payslips today – but it is only 50 years ago that the first large payroll business application went live on a Leo computer – to produce the pay packets for 1670 bakery workers in Lyons

A seminar at the Science Museum , sponsored by LogicaCMG, marked the 50 th anniversary of the world’s first computer payroll system, in February 1954, when it went “live” for Lyons Bakeries on the legendary LEO I computer.

This event took us back to some systems that you would hardly believe today – and gave an insight into the challenges faced in getting organisations to put payroll onto the early computers. These early computing machines did not have backing store and had tiny amounts of main store.

Wages Departments had to get weekly pay packets ready every week – containing the right cash, every Friday, from the previous week’s clock cards. So payroll was what would today be called a `business critical’ application. Just handling the coins in the days of pounds, shillings and pence, was a major operation. Wages Departments had accounting machines (National and Burroughs) and lots of staff carrying out repetitive clerical work.

David Caminer described the challenges, recounting with enthusiasm what he and his colleagues had done to design the programs for payroll on Leo I, and to get all the practical arrangements in place for the first Lyons payroll system, including contingency plans. The employee input was on cards, the hours worked on paper tape, PAYE and pay was calculated, and output was a payslip on a line printer and an updated employee record on a card punch.

Other speakers described other payroll applications. John Lewis described the army officers' payroll designed for Glyn Mills Bank. It was run on a LEO ll service computer and used magnetic tape for officer records.

Peter Barnes and Henry Goodman described the payroll application done at De Havillands in 1958 on a Ferranti Pegasus. This used paper tape for input and output; the payslips were printed off line on Creed teleprinters.

The Navy Dockyards payroll application was described; it integrated payroll and job costing , and was run from 1965 on Leo III with an optical marked form reader – the Autolector.

Army pay and records were described by the project leader (Col Donald Moore). He described the procurement project, which had bids from all the manufacturers in the late 50’s. The central system used data from 750 local pay offices, and held an elaborate details record for each soldier. An IBM system was selected – a very big valve machine. One story was that reliability was improved by an engineer who had an ear for the right ring when a valve was tapped.

Many joined in the discussion. Richard Dean said that payroll had also been running on ICT computers and card equipment. Another said that Elliott 405 with magnetic film reader had been used for payroll.

Because of limited store, payslips on some of the early systems used the staff number only; personal names were too big for the storage – systems are more friendly today.

The concluding talk brought us up to date with payroll now. Bryan Mills, former boss of LogicaCMG, explained why many organisations use specialist service payroll bureau (outsource in today’s terminology). Electronic means of distributing payslip information can be expected to come in, and payrolls for big organisations will continue to need large systems.

The event was a celebration of Leo achievements, there was a capacity turnout – mostly Leo people - it is remarkable how strong the community spirit still is among those who worked on Leo. John Aris chaired and organised this excellent event, including commercial sponsorship! (champagne for all! – but don’t expect that at any other CCS event)

Some photographs from the event are on the Leo Society website at http://www.leo-computers.org.uk/payseminar.htm

More information on the Computer Conservation Society, and on its future events can be found at: http://www.bcs.org/sg/ccs

This article was written by Alan Thomson