Obituaries of David Caminer, who has died at the age of 92, have focussed on the fact that he was the world's first systems analyst. But his death also revives memories of Leo, the world's first proper business computer.

Leo emerged from the heady days immediately after World War Two when a bankrupt Britain could spare few resources for the development of new-fangled computers. It was an early example of the kind of co-operation between universities and business that later produced Silicon Valley in the US and the cluster of technical companies around Cambridge University that has been dubbed Silicon Fen.

Lyons Corner Houses were in those days as much a feature of British life as Tescos or Boots are today. They provided good affordable food and to keep prices down the company had been a pioneer in what was then called scientific management.

Lyons early on spotted the possibilities of computing and partly financed Maurice Wilkes's Edsac computer at Cambridge, in return for help in building a computer to help run its business. The circuitry on Leo 1 was almost identical to that on Edsac.

Mike Hally recalls in his book Electronic Brains (Granta, £15.99, ISBN 1-86207-663-4) how the first program in 1951 valued all the goods produced at Lyons bakeries. It was a relatively simply task that some thought to trivial to computerise. But Caminer felt the team need experience doing live work on time.

It was the first ever business application. Soon Leo was doing everything "from clock-in to payroll"; Caminer's team had virtually invented business computing from scratch.

So how was that the UK got in first? Wilkes generously acknowledged in a 2003 interview with me how much he owed to a free exchange of knowledge with US pioneers, and that American projects took longer because their aim from was to produce general-purpose models that could be sold on the open market.

Edsac was built specifically for use by researchers at Cambridge, not as a commercial project, and so it was easier to cut corners. Leo was produced initially for specific purposes by one company, though later models were sold to other companies.

Lyons was so well known as a caterer and tea merchant that it had a hard time being taken seriously as a computer company, even though it spun its computer operations off as Leo Computers in 1959.

But it would anyway have had a hard time fighting off the clout and marketing expertise of IBM, which had actually come late to computing. After a series of mergers Leo Computers eventually became part of ICL.

Hally says Caminer was bitter about government short-sightedness, particularly in not granting a contract to calculate the effects of tax changes. Caminer told him: "We had minimal government support. They simply didn't realise that business computing would become vastly more important in volume than scientific computing. If they could find some scientific computer with time to spare to do the tax tables, then they went there if they were saving a few bob. It was very sad."