Inventor of Marksensing and document reading devices, Broido worked for British Tabulating Machine Company Limited (BTM), and his inventions and patents were transferred to them. He became Senior Development Engineer on optical reading machines, becoming a pioneer in this field with over 100 patents to his credit. Among his inventions was the first sterling calculator, single cycle decimal calculator, computing scale, graph reader, and the printing calculator. He invented the first bar code system, which he called mini marks, and patented this on 6 February 1954.
In 1956 Raymond Thompson of Lyons recruited Broido as Chief Mechanical Engineer for all aspects of the LEO computer, and he worked closely with Dr Pinkerton, designing optical mark reading machines such as the Lector and Autolector. When Lyons started to export their computers to Eastern Europe, Broido acted as interpreter and Sales Director. He spoke fluent German and Russian and had a very good working knowledge of Serbian. Broido was transferred to ICL at the time of the mergers and was mainly responsible for East European sales. Between 1966 and 1970 he made 34 trips to Eastern Europe for ICL, of which 21 were to the Soviet Union.
