Daniel Broido (17 May 1903 – October 10, 1990) was a Russian-British engineer who played a significant role in the development of computers. Daniel was the son of Mark Broido and Eva (née Lwowna) while they were political exiles in Kirensk,

Siberia Siberia ( ; , ) is an extensive geographical region comprising all of North Asia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It has formed a part of the sovereign territory of Russia and its predecessor states ...

. They had been active

Mensheviks The Mensheviks ('the Minority') were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) which split with Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903. Mensheviks held more moderate and reformist ...

and Eva had translated ''Women under Socialism'' by

August Bebel Ferdinand August Bebel (; 22 February 1840 – 13 August 1913) was a German socialist activist and politician. He was one of the principal founders of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Bebel, a woodworker by trade, co-founded the Sa ...

into Russian. She was active with an illegal workers library producing and distributing written material. She was arrested in January 1901 and, after 15 months in prison, sentenced to three to five years in exile in Siberia. The family returned to

St Petersburg Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the List of cities and towns in Russia by population, second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the Neva, River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland ...

illegally, where his sister

Vera Broido Vera Broido (7 September 1907 – 11 February 2004) was a Russian-born writer and a chronicler of the Russian Revolution, as one who grew up through it and lost her mother to its aftermath. Life Vera Broido was born in Saint Petersburg in 1907 ...

was born in 1907. He moved to Germany and studied mechanical engineering in Berlin, and found work as an engineer working for

Rotaprint Rotaprint was a company manufacturing offset litho printing presses located in Berlin, Germany from 1904 to 1989. At the height of its activities it employed about 1,000 workers making it one of the largest employers in the Wedding A wedding ...

. In 1934 Rotaprint sent him to London, where he settled. He remained in the United Kingdom during the Second World War, working for Caterpillar Tractors during World War II. In 1956, Broido was appointed Chief Mechanical Engineer to work on the

LEO computer The LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) was a series of early computer systems created by J. Lyons and Co. The first in the series, the LEO I, was the first computer used for commercial business applications. The prototype LEO I was modelled closely ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Broido, Daniel 1903 births 1990 deaths Computer engineers People from Kirensky District Engineers from Berlin Emigrants from the Russian Empire to Germany German emigrants to the United Kingdom