BA (Hons)
1929–2022
Role: Worked in computer division on LEO from 1952
Responsibility: First female commercial programmer
Mary Coombs is recognised as the world’s first female commercial programmer, working on the programming of LEO to handle payroll, among other things, and going on to become a supervisor who worked to locate and repair coding errors in LEO programmes. Coombs had studied a BA Honours degree in French from Queen Mary University in London, and first worked at J. Lyons & Co. as a holiday job.
Although she had not formally studied maths, her skill with numbers meant she found a job in the Lyons Statistical Office, where she heard of an opening working on the LEO computers. She completed the Lyons’ ‘computer appreciation course’, and her performance was sufficiently stellar that she landed a job working alongside Frank Land, from which point she worked on LEO, LEO II and LEO III, and was in charge of rewriting programs from LEO II for the LEO III. She went on to work for English Electric LEO Computers and International Computers Limited (ICL).
Biographies – The Centre for Computing History, The Guardian, Wikipedia, The Times, Computer Weekly, Computing, BCS, The Register, The Telegraph, the ACM, The Elective, The Independent and BBC Radio 4’s Last Word on Friday 18 March 2022