Elliott Brothers
More info
- Creator
- William Elliott
- Released
- 1804
- Type
- Instrument and computer maker
- Successor
- English Electric
A London instrument maker from the Napoleonic era that became one of Britain's first computer manufacturers in the 1950s.
The firm started in 1804 making drawing and surveying instruments, and moved into electronics by way of military fire-control systems. The Elliott 401 (1953) was an experimental machine, but the real success was the Elliott 803 of 1959: transistorised, relatively cheap and sold in a couple of hundred units to universities and industry.
In computer science the company is best remembered as Tony Hoare's employer. He had come up with quicksort shortly before joining, and led the work on Elliott ALGOL (1962), one of the first compilers for the language. The computer business passed to English Electric in 1967 and into ICL the year after.