Mary Lee Woods

Mary Lee Woods, 2013

Mary Lee Woods (born March 12, 1924 in Birmingham , Great Britain - † November 29, 2017 ) was an English mathematician and computer programmer who worked on a team that did programs at the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester for the Mark I. , the Ferranti Mark I and Mark developed 1 Star computer. She met Conway Berners-Lee while working at Ferranti. Sir Tim Berners-Lee is one of her children.

Early life and education

She was born in Birmingham in 1924. Her parents were teachers, she had a brother who served in the Royal Air Force (RAF) during World War II and was killed while on duty. She attended Yardley Grammar School in Yardley, Birmingham , where she initially became interested in mathematics. From 1942 to 1944 she completed a two-year degree in mathematics at Birmingham University , which was compressed due to the war . She then worked for the Telecommunications Institute in Malvern until she graduated from the third year of her studies in 1946. After graduation, she received a scholarship from Richard van der Riet Woolley to work at the Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra , Australia from 1947 to 1951 , and then to work as a computer programmer at Ferranti in Manchester .

Ferranti software development group

When she came to Ferranti, she was working in a group led by John Bennett.

She worked on the Ferranti Mark I and Ferranti Mark I * computers. Programs were written in machine code . Every bit had to be right, there was plenty of room for error. The machines used 40-bit serial arithmetic (with a double-length accumulator ). This created considerable difficulty in scaling the variables in the program to maintain sufficient arithmetic accuracy.

Members of the programming team found it useful to store the following string, which represented the numbers 0 to 31 in the International Teletype Code No. 1 ( Baudot ) 5-bit binary code of the paper tape used for input and output:

/ E @ A: SIU½DRJNFCKTZLWHYPQOBG "MXV £

Another of the programming difficulties involved the machines' two-tier memory. There were eight pages of Williams cathode ray tubes (CRT) as fast primary storage and 512 pages of secondary storage on a magnetic drum. Each page consisted of 32 40-bit words that appeared as 64 20-bit lines on the CRTs. The programmer had to control all transfers between electronic and magnetic storage, and the transfers were slow and needed to be kept to a minimum. For programs that deal with large data blocks such matrices deal that could partitioning into page blocks can be problematic. The Mark I machine worked in integer arithmetic. Because of its radar background, the engineers built the machine to display the lines on the CRTs with the most significant bit on the right. This could make logical sense, but was changed for the more conventional system for the Mark I *, which also worked in fractions and not in whole numbers. In addition, the Baudot teletype code has been replaced with a code in the following order:

ø £ ½0 @: $ ABCDEFGHIJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ

Bugs were hard to find. Programmers could sit at the machine control panel and watch the machine execute an instruction at a time to see where unwanted events occurred. However, machine time became more and more valuable. John Bennett therefore suggested that Woods write a diagnostic program to print out the contents of the accumulator and certain lines of memory at certain points in the program so that the diagnosis can be done outside the machine. The challenge of her "stop and print" routine was that she had to monitor the program under diagnostics without disturbing it, and there was very little space in the fast store. With JM Bennett and DG Prinz she was involved in writing interpretive subroutines used by the Ferranti group.

Program errors were one problem, machine errors another. The computer regularly misread the binary digits. Engineers believed mathematicians could compensate for this by programming math tests, and mathematicians were too easy to assume that malfunction was due to the machine when it was due to a bug. There was inevitable friction between mathematicians and engineers. It focused on a program Woods had written to invert a matrix to solve 40 simultaneous equations - a large number at the time. It took too long for the machine to process the long data series without errors.

While at Ferranti, Woods discovered that women were paid less than men. So she turned to the human resources department and was able to convince them to give women equal pay and rights.

Private life

Mary Lee Woods was married to Conway Berners-Lee, whom she met while working on the Ferranti team. Their eldest son, Sir Tim Berners-Lee , invented the World Wide Web .

After raising her children, she became a math teacher and then a programmer with BASIC, Fortran and other languages ​​before retiring in 1987. She died in November 2017 at the age of 93.

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Mary Lee Berners-Lee . In: The Times . January 20, 2018, ISSN  0140-0460 ( thetimes.co.uk [accessed December 6, 2018]).
2. ^ Scientific pioneers honored by The University of Manchester. Retrieved December 6, 2018 . 
3. ↑ r / IAmA - I am Tim Berners-Lee. I invented the WWW 25 years ago and I am concerned and excited about its future. AMA. Retrieved December 6, 2018 . 
4. ↑ Manchester Mark December 1 , 2008, accessed December 6, 2018 . 
5. ↑ Programming the Mark I: Early Programming Activity at the University of Manchester - IEEE Journals & Magazine. Retrieved December 6, 2018 (American English). 
6. ↑ Develop a brief description of one of the first computers. University of Jena, accessed on December 13, 2018 . 
7. ↑ The Ferranti Mark 1 Handbook (Digital 60). May 15, 2009, accessed December 6, 2018 . 
8. ↑ Comments, queries, and debate - IEEE Journals & Magazines. Retrieved December 10, 2018 (American English). 
9. ^ JM Bennett, DG Prinz, ML Woods: Interpretative Sub-routines . In: Proceedings of the 1952 ACM National Meeting (Toronto) (=  ACM '52 ). ACM, New York, NY, USA 1952, p. 81-87 , doi : 10.1145 / 800259.809002 ( acm.org [accessed December 10, 2018]).
10. ↑ Abbate, Janet, Recoding Gender
11. ↑ Mary Bellis Mary Bellis wrote on the topics of inventors, Inventions for 18 Years, Was a Film Producer, director .: How Much Do You Know about the History of the Internet? Retrieved December 13, 2018 . 
12. ^ Mary Lee Berners-Lee - Voices of Science. Retrieved December 13, 2018 . 
13. ↑ Michael Moorstedt: How the web inventor wants to save the network . In: sueddeutsche.de . August 28, 2018, ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed January 7, 2019]).