BBC 4 The I.T. Girls
August 2013, 11.00 am BBC Radio 4. Fronted by Martha Lane-Fox its contributors
include, Mary Coombs, Dame Stephanie Shirley, Ann Moffat and Tilly Blythe. From
the 1950s to the mid-1970s in Britain, many of the pioneers of early computing were
women. This was a highly skilled new world of work providing opportunities that were
often in sharp contrast to the established norms of post-war British life, with new
technology helping drive social change.
Mary Coombs was the first woman to program the world’s first commercially
available business computer: the Lyons LEO. She tells us what it was like to work
on this machine – which was the size of a room.
In 1962 Dame Stephanie Shirley founded a programming company, Freelance
Programmers, which only employed women. She became a very successful figure in
the industry.
Ann Moffat started her career at Kodak in 1959. She programmed the black box
flight recorders for Concorde and wrote missile programmes for Polaris.
The Science Museum’s Keeper of Technologies and Engineering, Dr Tilly Blyth,
explains the significance of her museum’s collection of machines that changed these
women’s lives.
Martha Lane Fox presents the programme. In 1998 she co-founded Lastminute.com,
and become one of the pioneers of the dot com era. See
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b038hfkx
