Mary Lee Woods, future computer pioneer and 'grandmother of the internet', was born in Wallasey, Cheshire, England.
Mary Kenneth Lee Woods was born on 5 May 1924 in Wallasey, Cheshire, England, into a family that valued education despite modest means. Her mother had been a schoolteacher before marriage, a career women were often forced to abandon, and this experience instilled in Mary's parents a strong belief in the importance of education for their daughter.
This early grounding in the value of learning would prove pivotal: Mary went on to study mathematics at Swansea University, later served in the Women's Royal Naval Service during the Second World War working with early codebreaking and ballistics calculations, and ultimately became one of the first professional computer programmers in Britain, working on the pioneering Ferranti Mark 1 computer in Manchester.
Her birth in 1924 places her among a generation of women who came of age during the Second World War and who, through wartime necessity, gained unprecedented access to technical and scientific work previously closed to them. Mary's subsequent career at Ferranti and later at the Automatic Telephone and Electric Company would establish her as a foundational figure in the history of computing, and she would later become known globally as the mother of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web — earning her the popular epithet 'the grandmother of the internet'.