Well yes, but it used to have its problems – the prawns had to be packed with special ice packs, which cost a profit-gnawing pounds 12 for every 3 kilogrammes of crustaceans.Linda Hill, the boss, was unhappy with this and came up with a wonderful solution. “You only get let off if you’re dead or in intensive care,” she adds. Boot ‘em out of the empire, I say!ARGYLL prawns are a delicacy in Mediterranean countries. Easdale Seafoods of Balvicar packs them up and sends off to Spain – a nice little earner, you may think.

She will, she tells me mournfully, be fined A$50 (pounds 25) for breaching her country’s law. A chum failed to turn up at Australia House to vote the other day, because she was working somewhere quite other. Art sees trades opposition.” Bunhill’s fridge still has the odd bottle left if there are any more ideas (they don’t have to be long, just clever).Don’t give an XWHICH is the beastliest country in the world? Answer: Australia. He says he overheard this during negotiations for imported containers: “Now stop, major general, are negro jam pots won?” Also, during conversations between the artistic and commercial world: “No it is opposed. It hung on to its Corner Shops with their Tweenies as Mr Forte came in with altogether more modern ideas and, Professor Land says, “ran rings round them”. Tweenies and Leo Computers sadly went the same way – out of business.THE FIRST winner of a bottle of superior champagne in the Great Bunhill Business Palindrome Challenge is David Lashmar, who runs Beano’s (“Britain’s largest second-hand music store”) in Croydon. It was so successful that Leo Computers was formed, and remained one of Britain’s leading makers through the Fifties.Unfortunately J Lyons’ business strategy was not as advanced as its data processing.

“The teashop manageresses ‘phoned in their orders and the computer worked out the production schedules,” Professor Land recalls. “Every single thing we did had never been done before.”Leo was based on Edsiac, another contender for the “first” title, built at Cambridge It started work in 1949, and was soon earning its pennies. He has helped write a book, User Driven Innovation, which tells how Lyons used to be at the cutting edge of technology “It was tremendously exciting,” he says. It first ran in 1948 at Manchester University and was later sold by Ferranti as the Mark One. It was 22 feet long, seven feet high, weighed half a ton and was nothing like as powerful as the tiniest machine we have in our office.
Which leads neatly to Leo. Did you know that the first business computer anywhere was (supposedly) built by J Lyons, maker of tea cakes and proprietor of corner shops? I was told this by Frank Land, now visiting professor at the LSE, but once a boffin with Leo Computers, a J Lyons subsidiary. The Computer Conservation Society is starting on a reconstruction of “Baby”, the world’s first stored programme computer (supposedly – such claims cause riots in scientific circles).