![]() ![]() It was Dina St Johnston who in Britain overturned and questioned this orthodoxy. ![]() The important bit was deemed to be the creation not of software but of hardware, which men oversaw. Many early coders were women because programming was seen as secretarial drudgery akin to typing. When she died in 2007, one obituary said that she’d “left a lasting contribution to both the art and science of programming” – and the company she founded still exists, now as a part of GE.” īack in the 1950s computers were enormous machines that filled a room. She produced pioneering real-time passenger information systems – the forerunner of those clickety-click timetable boards in stations up and down the country – and flight simulators for the RAF. They created software for the BBC, Unilever, BAA, British Rail and GEC. She founded Vaughan Programming Services in 1959, the first software house in the UK. No programmers were selling software directly to the industry or, as she put it, as quoted in the Computer Journal in 2008: “There was a shortage of processor-oriented people who were happy to go round a steel works in a hard hat.” Dina St Johnston, however, loved working with machinery, and rejoiced in putting on the hard hat later in life she collected fast cars and drove them at enormous speed around the private roads on her estate. She left school at 17 to join pioneering computer firm Elliot Brothers, where she learned programming – and thought she had spotted a gap in the market. “Dina St Johnston (nee Vaughan) had always had an independent streak, her friend, Colin Porter, chief executive and secretary of the Institute of Railway Signal Engineers, told me. He remained in demand as a speaker at conferences on computers for many years afterwards, and he is commemorated in the street name Barnard Road at Bowthorpe. In the article, Mr Barnard, who served as City Treasurer from 1953 to 1974, reflected on the performance of the computer and the progress and mistakes made in the first year of operation. Mr Barnard was invited to present a paper on the Norwich experience to the British Computer Society in November 1957, and a version of this was published in The Computer Journal in 1958 as ‘The First Year with a Business Computer’. The Norwich computer attracted a good deal of interest, throughout the UK and beyond. Elliott Automation (as it later became) merged with English Electric in 1967, and the following year its assets were acquired by GEC (the General Electric Company Ltd). The Elliott 405 was a general business machine featuring bulk storage on magnetic film and other features designed for commercial data processing. The first production machines were the 400 series, starting in 1955, and Elliott subsequently developed the 800 series, forerunner to many of the world’s computer designs. It was here that their first computers were built, following on from their work on real-time digital control for naval guns. The company diversified into control systems, and during the second world war established a research laboratory at Borehamwood in Hertfordshire to carry out development work for the Navy. The firm of Elliott Brothers was formed in London in 1801, and made scientific apparatus. Norfolk Record Office: ACC 2005/170 (facsimile) Photograph of Norwich City Council’s first computer being delivered to the City Treasurer’s Department in Bethel Street, Norwich, 1957. ![]()
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