British Teahouse Company... invented business software?

Fascinating NYT article about a post-WWII British teahouse chain that invented business computing. The effort produced the first business software solution, which none other than FoMoCo purchased and utilized as its first such computational utility. Read and enjoy -- then furously comment, correct, and bicker (or resign your membership!).

From the article: ===========

Lyons was the first company in the world to computerize its commercial operations, partly because it had so many of them: it had more than 200 teahouses in London and its suburbs, with each Lyons Corner House daily generating thousands of paper receipts and needing scores of fresh baked items. ...it also operated hotels, laundries, and ice cream, candy and meat pie companies. And, of course, tea plantations.

“Americans can’t believe this,” Paul Ceruzzi, a historian of computing and curator at the National Air and Space Museum, said in an interview last week. “They think you’re making it up. It really was true.”

That a food conglomerate did this seems almost incredible. New Scientist said in 2001: “In today’s terms it would be like hearing that Pizza Hut had developed a new generation of microprocessor, or McDonald’s had invented the Internet.”