Mary Lee Woods

Who is Mary Lee Woods?

Mary Lee Woods, now Mrs C M Berners-Lee is a British mathematician and computer programmer who worked in a team that developed programs for the Manchester University Mark 1, Ferranti Mark 1 and Mark 1 Star computers. She is married to Conway Berners-Lee, also in the team. Their eldest son, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, invented the World Wide Web.

From 1942-1944, she took a wartime compressed two-year degree course in mathematics at the University of Birmingham. She then worked for the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Malvern until 1946 when she returned to take the third year of her degree. She worked at the Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra, Australia from 1947 to 1951 when she joined Ferranti in Manchester as a computer programmer.

The programming group was led by John Bennett. Members of this team found it useful to commit to memory the following sequence of characters which represented the numbers 0 to 31 in the International Telegraph Alphabet No. 1 5-bit binary code of the paper tape that was used for input and output.

Mrs Berners-Lee worked on both the Ferranti Mark 1 and the Ferranti Mark 1* computers. Programming in those days was very different to the situation today. Programs were written in machine code, using the basic binary digits with which all machines operate. Every bit had to be right; there was plenty of room for error, but there was opportunity to be cunning too. She found it to be great fun. The machines used serial 40-bit arithmetic. This meant that here were considerable difficulties in scaling the variables in the program to maintain adequate arithmetic precision.