Seventy years ago, in 1951, the world’s first computer built for business use was put into production <https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/30/leo_70/>. It was called “LEO”, short for “Lyons Electronic Office”. The J Lyons company ran a string of teashops across the UK, and an ongoing problem that the shop managers (and central office) faced was how to accurately predict the supplies needed for the next day’s business, given that much of it (cakes etc) was highly perishable, and so had to be manufactured on a few hours’ notice. This “bakery valuation” was a statistical problem, based on crunching a lot of raw data, looking at past demand, seasonal variations etc, and it was still a novel concept that a computer turned out to be better than humans at doing the necessary calculations. The computer turned out to be so useful that the UK Ministry of Supply hired it to get some ballistic calculations done. Later it also did other jobs at the company, like payroll. Actually, a lot of this (except the payroll) sounds to me very much like number-crunching, which would surely have been considered more of a “scientific” than a “business” computing application. Remember, there was this dichotomy between “scientific” and “business” computing use back then, that continued right into about the 1970s. This division existed in hardware (e.g. decimal arithmetic for “business” use, binary for “scientific”) and software (COBOL being the preferred programming language for “business” use, things like FORTRAN and ALGOL for “scientific”). The teashop company spun off the computer business as a separate operation in 1954, which went on to bring out the LEO II and LEO III machines before being acquired by English Electric, which in turn later merged with ICT to create ICL. According to the article linked above, the last LEO machine was decommissioned in 1981, and the last Lyons teashop closed that same year. I first learned about LEO and the Lyons teashops some decades ago, from a book called “Early British Computers”, by Simon Lavington, published in 1980.