Mary Lee Berners-Lee, pioneering computer programmer and mother of Tim Berners-Lee, died aged 93 in London.
Mary Lee Berners-Lee died on 3 January 2017 at the age of 93. Her death was widely reported, with obituaries in The Guardian and technology industry press honouring her as one of the pioneers of the earliest generation of professional computer programmers.
She had worked on the Ferranti Mark 1 in the 1950s, one of the first commercially available general-purpose electronic computers in the world, and she and her husband Conway Berners-Lee met while working together on that very machine. Their shared professional life in early computing directly shaped the household in which their son, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, grew up — an environment saturated with talk of computers, logic, and binary numbers at the family dinner table, which he has credited as a major influence on his invention of the World Wide Web in 1989.
Mary continued to work in computing and as an independent IT contractor and consultant well into her later decades, remaining active in the field long after many of her male contemporaries had retired or moved into management. Her death marked the loss of one of the last living links to the very first generation of British computer programmers, and renewed public appreciation for the often-overlooked women who built the foundations of modern computing.