Back when debugging the Lyons Electronic Office led to interference from the building’s elevator
Obituary British programmer Mary Coombs, the first woman to program a computer designed for commercial applications, passed away on February 28 at the age of 93. Coombs (née Blood), was born in northwest London on February 4, 1929 to William Blood and Ruth Blood (née Petri). She graduated from Queen Mary University London with a BA Honors degree in French. After spending a summer teaching English in Switzerland, she returned home in 1952 and took a temporary job in the ice-cream sales office of food chain J. Lyons & Co. Shortly thereafter, she became a management trainee in the company’s statistical office. At that time, J. Lyons & Co. became interested in applying computing to company business operations – overseeing a chain of 250 tea shops and several corner houses in London. The company devised a test to find people to program the Lyons Electronic Office, or LEO. LEO was developed at the behest of J. Lyons & Co. chief accountant John Simmons who recognized the potential of automating business operations. Simmons struck a deal to fund the Cambridge team developing the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) in exchange for the right to build a copy. The catering company sent out a memo announcing a “computer appreciation course“ to recruit employees to help program LEO. Mary Coombs was the only woman among the 10 participants and one of the two who ended up being offered a programming job, the other being Frank Land. „It was a simple, well, sort of intelligence test really, to see whether you could manipulate things, work out the logic of things and so on,“ Coombs recounted in an oral history [ PDF] she recorded for the British Library.
