Mary Clare Coombs was a British computer programmer and schoolteacher.
15 Facts About Mary Coombs
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Mary Coombs attended Putney High School and St Paul's Girls' School and earned a BA Honours degree in French, with History, from Queen Mary University of London.
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Mary Coombs's father believed in women's education and her sister worked in microbiology and bacteriology.
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Mary Coombs was clear that women should have their own careers and interests.
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Once Mary Coombs began officially working with LEO in 1952, she was taught how to program by John Grover, one of the first LEO programmers.
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Mary Coombs worked on programs for early LEO customers such as the Met Office, the British Army and the Inland Revenue.
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Mary Coombs is recognised as the first woman to work on a commercial computer.
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Mary Coombs spent most of her time as a supervisor, checking for logical and syntactical errors in the programs that other people wrote.
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Mary Coombs developed programs for internal company use and for outside clients as another portion of the business computing service offered by the firm.
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Mary Coombs was in charge of rewriting programs from LEO II to work with LEO III, since LEO III used a different programming language.
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Mary Coombs had sports clubs and an Amateur Dramatic Society in which Coombs was involved.
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Mary Coombs continued to work in the computing field, mainly editing manuals.
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Mary Coombs briefly taught a computer programming course at Princess Marina Centre at Seer Green for disabled residents.
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In 1969, when she realised that she would not be able to work full-time, Mary Coombs left the LEO team and briefly worked for Freelance Programmers, a company founded by Stephanie Shirley.
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Mary Coombs died on 28 February 2022, at the age of 93, survived by her three children, three grandchildren, and her sister, Ruth.