First female business computer programmer dies

Mary Clare Coombs, née Blood, born 4 February 1929, has died following difficulties arising just after a Covid-19 an infection.

Combs at first joined Lyons & Co in 1952 as a management trainee, next a getaway occupation organized for her by her father, the company’s senior professional medical medical professional. In the beginning, she was set to do the job in the company’s statistical business working a calculating device, but was shortly presented the opportunity to join the Lyons Electronic Business office (LEO) staff, writing systems for the world’s initial small business pc.

Recalling her knowledge of performing on the LEO, Coombs claimed: “We were being all engaged in a significant experience.” She joined the computing group when there were being just 3 programmers on board – all adult males – getting the only lady in a class of 12 on an introductory laptop appreciation training course. From there, it was straight into payroll apps for a fast expanding assortment of exterior purchasers, as nicely as establishing plans for inner firm use.

It was a enormous problem. Not only had considerably of the operate by no means been performed in advance of, she explained it also involved operating on a notoriously unreliable valve personal computer that experienced just 2 KB of laptop storage in contrast with the lots of gigabytes readily available to today’s programmers.

“When it was LEO 1, you had to know a whole lot about the machine itself for the reason that there was so minor storage house that every single instruction had to be necessary, or it experienced to be knocked out,” she mentioned.

Together with programming the LEO, she also labored as a programmer, managing payroll at corporations this sort of as Ford Motor Corporation, and was associated in a wide range of work opportunities together with tax tables for the Inland Profits, Satisfied Place of work perform and the calculation of ballistics for the Military. She went on to develop into a supervisor and worked to identify and fix coding errors in the programs established by some others.

Family commitments meant that she ceased comprehensive-time programming in 1964, but continued to do the job part-time modifying laptop or computer manuals, and for a few months ran a laptop programming system for seriously disabled citizens at the Princess Marina Centre, Seer Inexperienced, sponsored jointly by ICL and Buckinghamshire County Council.

It was not until eventually late 1969 that she finished her official relationship with the LEO crew. 

Coombs returned to full-time employment in September 1973 as a key university instructor, completing a 3-calendar year postgraduate instructing program in 1976. She retired from instructing in 1985 and went on to do the job as a purchaser in the water treatment marketplace.

In 1955, she married John Coombs, himself briefly a laptop or computer programmer on the LEO group, who died in 2012. With each other they had a daughter, Anne, who died aged 6. Amongst 1965 and 1969, they adopted 3 young children, Andrew, Paul and Gillian. They survive her, as do a younger sister, Ruth, and three grandchildren, Grace, Jemma and John.