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.
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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.
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