In 1951 Mary Coombs Became The First Female Commercial Programmer

In 1951 in England Mary Coombs became the first female commercial programmer at J Lyons & Co the family owned teashop business that was incredibly forward looking in realising the potential of computers for transforming businesses .

She was also the first non-mathematics graduate to write programs for the world's first business computer, the Lyons Electronic Office (Leo). Leo used 6,000 valves which had to be tested every day and it had just 2KB of memory.

If I had possessed the attached information about Mary's worklife when my book was first published you can rest assured it would have occupied pride of place in its description of the history of commercial computer programming.