Sheila Hawton obituary

My mother, Sheila Hawton, who has died aged 91, liked in her later years to surprise people with the fact that her first job was as a computer programmer.

After graduating from Royal Holloway College, which was then an all-women's college of London University (and is now Royal Holloway London), with a master's in aerodynamics, in the early 1950s she headed to Ferranti in Manchester and worked with the mathematician Conway Berners-Lee (the father of Tim Berners-Lee) on the Ferranti Mk 1 computer and later the Pegasus computer. Marriage and the arrival of children ended her programming career, as it so often did at that time.