Interview with Ann Moffatt

Ann Moffatt was born in London in July 1939. She is the oldest child of three, her siblings include twins; a brother and sister. Here mother never worked outside of the home and her father was a carpenter who went from job to job. The family lived in Harrow. Ann describes her family life as “fairly mundane”.

Ann was the first in her family to go to grammar school. She says of the experience: “I had fairly normal education from a school that was started by Lord Shaftesbury who did a lot for the slave children in England. Of course it was wartime at the beginning of my school career, so food was short, we were always having to go and hide away because the planes were coming to bomb us; we were only 12 miles from the centre of London, so I guess it was a weird school career.”

It was at school that Ann met Kathleen, the pair were friends for 60 years. She says: “We saw each other through everything.  Kathleen was always much cleverer than I was and got wonderful reports, but I always got ‘Could do better’, but I knew that I couldn’t do better than Kathleen because she was absolutely fabulous.”

Ann’s favourite subject was geography and she had visions of travelling round the world to see the wonderful places that she’d read about. Her next favourite subject was ‘sums’, as she called it. “We didn’t call it mathematics but sums, I loved it because it was easy.  If you had to write an English essay, somebody who marked it could have an opinion about what you’d written, whereas with maths there was one answer, it was right or it was wrong, it was simple.”

Ann started working on a morning paper round at the age of 13, she progressed to a Saturday job at a large department store, which she describes as “really fun”.  She explains: “I worked with the buyer of several departments of that store and I used to do all her mathematics, but it was really just sums, it was adding up and multiplying and sometimes percentages, that’s the highest level of maths we got to. She wanted me to work and train as a buyer under her. My mother wanted that too, she wanted me to leave school. However, my headmistress decided that I was far too bright to do that.  In fact, she said to my mother that it’s rare we get two girls to go to Oxford or Cambridge, but Ann and Kathleen will both go to either Oxford or Cambridge and she’ll get a PhD.  My mother didn’t understand any of that, but agreed with the headmistress that I could stay on another year.”

Unfortunately, the family finances prevented Ann going to university and she had to leave school. Her parents decided that they only had money for their son to go to university and that “it didn’t matter for the two girls as they’d get married.”

Ann says that the woman in the department store was a role model for her. She explains: “She influenced me a lot because she used to go skiing and she used to go to Austria and Germany and places like that. I realised that a woman could go and do this!  She was the only female buyer in the whole store, it was a very big store, and she was highly regarded as working very hard. I wanted to be like her, I wanted to travel, that was my aim.  I didn’t want to work for work’s sake, I wanted to work so that I could earn enough money to travel round the world. I guess my mother had influence in a way. I didn’t want to be like her, I didn’t want to be dull and the only thing I would do was to sit at home and read novels.”

Having been forced to leave school when money got tight, Ann joined the Met Office in 1956. She says: “I joined the Met Office because I knew they would give me time off to study to get into university and get a university degree.”

Ann’s first job was in the ‘Sunshine Section’ where she checked sunshine records to ensure that towns had sunshine statistics recorded correctly. She explains: “The seaside towns would burn their cards to show that they had more sun than they really had so my job was to check them. I also had to do a sunshine diagram so that if you looked at the trajectory of the sun across the sky, often there were buildings or trees or something in the way, so you had to work out where the recorder could record and where it couldn’t.  That was quite a complex job.” Ann was next moved to the Hydrology Department.

Ann first read about computers in the newspapers, she says: “They were described as mechanical brains that were going to rule the world, going to change our lives, they were going to stop people going to work, we would all have leisure the whole time and the computers would do all the work.”

Her first professional experience with computers should have been a course at Bletchley Manor. Unfortunately, Ann, had a cycling accident while on holiday with her boyfriend and fractured her skull. She was unconscious for three weeks and missed the course. She was told that she would not be able to work for two years. The Met Office continued to pay her and she continued going to night classes to get qualifications for university.

Ann’s boyfriend, who worked for Kodak, saw a job advert on their noticeboard looking for someone with a maths degree to train to be a computer programmer. Knowing that Ann had read books on computers, 3 from the local library, and 10 from the university, and that she was interested in computers, he encouraged her to apply for the role.

Ann says: “I knew computers weren’t this sort of mechanical brain that the newspapers said, so I applied.  I was interviewed by nine people and when I told them I’d read books on computers, instead of interviewing me they just argued between themselves about which books they’d read and which books I’d read. They asked me a couple of questions and said that subject to a medical test, I could have the job. I’d been told I could not work for two years, and this was about six months after I’d had my skull fracture.” Ann passed her medical interview, deciding that as she was not asked about the scars on her face or whether she’d had an accident, she would not tell them.

 Initially, Ann worked on plug compatible card sorters and in 1959 she was sent on a course at Ferranti to learn about programming and computing. She says: “That was really exciting, but my boss told me the course cost £50 so I had to make use of it. I had to write a chi-squared analysis program, because we used a lot of chi-squared tests for quality control at Kodak.  There were regression and correlation programs in the  Ferranti library but not a chi-squared program.”

She was the only woman on a course of twelve men. She says: “My tutor was Conway Berners-Lee, who’s the father of Tim Berners-Lee who invented the worldwide web. Tim was four and his mum was just about to have another baby, so Tim was brought to the class, and I being the only woman in the class had to sit at the back and keep Tim quiet while the class was on.  So, I’ve held the hand of the hand that wrote the worldwide web, and that makes me very proud.”

When it came time to run their programs on the computer, everyone had a tape of about an inch across, Ann’s was slightly bigger, she says: “My tape was about a foot across. The tutor said I’d misunderstood what I was supposed to do. I’d stayed up every night of the week to get my program right, and of course, my program failed.”

The tutor offered to help and wrote a piece of code which included a function that the class was still to learn, however, his program also failed. When the function was taught in class after the weekend, Ann saw where he had gone wrong, corrected it and rewrote it herself. She says: “My program worked and immediately it was put in the Ferranti library.”

AS Kodak didn’t own a computer, testing was done on the Pegasus machine which Ann describes as being “housed in a the ballroom with floating floors and painted ceilings of a magnificent old Georgian house. Air conditioning was having the windows open and having a big aero-engine at one end of the room to blow cold air through the computer room.  If you were working on something secret there was a little bag with a beautiful silk cord in it that you took out and put across the computer to show everybody you were working on secret work and nobody was to come near the computer while you were working.”

She says of the experience of testing: “In those days it was £100 an hour to use Pegasus which was an awful lot of money in 1959, so we desk checked our programs. We swapped them with other people and asked them to desk check them too. We didn’t actually run them and test them until we were absolutely sure everything was right. This is something girls do very well, we don’t want to be found out doing things wrong, so we check and we check and we check and we check so that nobody sees us do things wrong. The programs were written in machine code, it wasn’t even written in Assembler, so it was just all numeric. It was fun to me, it was like a big maths problem.  You had to get the numbers in the right order and it was pretty simple, I enjoyed it.”

In 1960, Ann married Alan, her boyfriend who also worked at Kodak as a chemist and had persuaded her to apply for her job. He has proposed in hospital after her accident when she had said that no-one would marry her due to the scarring on her face.

 Her experience of working life after getting married was different to many, she says:  “In those days women just didn’t work after they were married.  In fact in many places, especially in Australia, you weren’t allowed to work after you were married, or if you did work, you came back as a sort of a temporary person in a lesser position. However, in England I was working for Kodak and I was only one of four computer programmers they had and so I was quite valuable. They promoted me to the level where usually only men with degrees got to and then only in their late thirties.  Here I was in my twenties, a woman with no degree at all and yet I was promoted to that senior staff level and allowed to eat in the senior staff dining room and so on.”

Kodak used computers to manage its process and production control. Ann says: “We had the whole multi-stage process from making emulsion for film, to cutting and slitting and packing it and then marketing it.  We had that all computerised which was something quite amazing in the early sixties.”

The company did most of its initial work on Pegasus but the programs outgrew the machine and they moved to Mercury which also struggled with some of the processes. Ann says: “We were doing a lot of linear programming and to get linear programs out, sometimes we’d hire time on another computer. We hired time on a Mercury in Sweden, for instance, and our systems ran for three weeks non-stop. This was unusual in those days because computers didn’t work for three weeks, usually they broke down, but we had checkpoints so that we could restart. Even then the system still didn’t resolve and give us an answer.”

Ann goes on to say how they heard that Britain was going to be ‘top dog in the world for computing’ with the government investing in the development of the Atlas computer, the biggest in the world and the first to have an operating system.   Ann adds: “We hadn’t yet developed computers with operating systems.  We had little routines that were printer drivers or magnetic tape routines and we used to either borrow them from the library or borrow them from each other, to do those things. We could hardly believe that Atlas was to have an operating system and that several programs were going to run at the same time. That was multi-programming; it was just so exciting.”

In 1963, Ann was sent to Ferranti in Manchester as a programmer to help get Atlas working. She says: “I did some work on what they called the ‘drum learning program’. Today, we’d call it swapping or multi-processing.”

Atlas sold for £3 million, about $150 million in todays $$$. Ann overheard Ferranti’s Sales Manager, Bernard Swann, tell his team that if Ferranti sold 3 Atlases to the Russians it would solve the Russian’s computer needs to the year 2000. It was the time of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). “The Russians and the Americans had their many computer-controlled nuclear missiles trained and ready to go. They were both trying to put a man on the moon. Atlas was less powerful that the MAC I use today.”

Kodak intended to buy 10% of the London University Atlas however, they needed permission from the Kodak head office in the US. Permission was denied as the company was rolling out IBM computers globally to be used for invoicing. Ann and the team found the IBM machines inferior to the potential of the Atlas and realised that head office did not appreciate that they were using computers for scientific work rather than invoicing.

Of the culture at Kodak, Ann says: “It was really good.  People talk about being a woman in a male industry, but I was the junior woman in most of the places I was in and the men were so helpful, they’d help me with anything. The men were very good, as was my boss at the Met Office, in helping me learn and get ahead.  So there was never any problems with me being a woman.”

Ann decided to leave Kodak after she had her first child, having worked right up until she had the baby and continued working at home afterwards. However, she found that being out of the office she was often left out of conversations about what was required in the work she was doing and had to repeat it.

As she was thinking about leaving Kodak, Ann saw an article in the local paper about Stephanie (Steve) Shirley who was setting up a company for women programmers who had children and wanted to work from home. She applied and was employed. The company had eleven people working for it and had just won the contract to analyse Concorde’s black box. This was Ann’s first job at Freelance Programmers (FPL).

Ann says: “It was decided that the black box would be analysed after each flight and Concorde wouldn’t be given an airworthiness certificate for the next flight until the black box was proved everything on the plane was functioning correctly. There were 40,000 instruments on the flight deck and many were read about ten times a second.  I knew what some of them did. … It was like a big statistical analysis with norms, averages and things like that, and, because of a fast turn round of 4 hours the programs had to be written in machine code.”

Concordes were being built by France and Britain each with a special purpose computer built by STC. Ann adds: “It was not like any other computer and didn’t have any assemblers or high level languages, both worked on machine code only.  Steve was a very good salesperson, and she thought it would only take one person to build the system. If we finished the system by the time Concorde was due to fly, we would get a bonus of £20,000; a tremendous amount of money in 1965.”

Ann started working on the system but found that it was bigger than just one person could manage. In the end twenty women worked on it. The plane had not yet flown and the system was based on data gathered while Concorde ran on the ground. Ann says: “They actually changed the shape of the Concorde’s wing from some of the analysis we did, and that delayed the Concorde. We got the system working just in time for the first Concorde to fly, and we got our bonus and had a big party.”

Of working from home, Ann says: “It was wonderful because you were working with other women who had babies, who were managing their children. They were vibrant women, they all enjoyed computing and programming and it was very collegiate. The company was growing and we were getting so much publicity.”

The publicity helped to generate yet more business and Ann says: “The British government thought we were interesting because we were using skills that were scarce, and would otherwise  be lost to business, because in those days if you were out of the computer industry for say two years, it was very difficult to get back in because things had moved so quickly. We were given lots of work from the British government, and from big companies as well, and it was very exciting.  We really felt we were working in a new way and looking after our babies at the same time.  It was great.”

Following on from a consultation project when pregnant with her second child, where Ann worked with Dr Buckland from the Economist Intelligence Unit, to conceptualise applying computers to building hospitals, Steve decided to split FPL and start F2. FPL would continue to provide program and design services and F2 would take on consultation work.

Ann says: “I was one of the directors of F2 when it started. We got more projects, but the real main project was this project 727, which was applying computers to hospital buildings.  It was very exciting because Computer Aided Design was very, very new in those days and very experimental, and we were using Computer Aided Design to prototype designs. This was in 1968, the very early days, and we were back using Atlas at Cambridge University, it was really fascinating.” As the project continued to grow, F2 was asked to create a PERT system to help keep control of it.

 Alongside these projects, Ann, as part of FPL and F2, also worked on the first computer system for the London Stock Exchange, among others.  Ann says of Steve: “Steve was a brilliant marketer and a brilliant conceptionalist, but I managed all the technical people. We had about 250 or so technical people.”

Having worked on a system for the Professional and Executive Register which Ann describes as “like the labour exchange or job exchange for executive people in England, run by the government”, Ann went to the launch. When no one else in the room wanted to demonstrate the system, Ann volunteered. She explains: “I started filling out the forms and I was being outrageous. I asked for an enormous salary, all school holidays off and I wanted a company that was 15 minutes’ walk away from my home.” After the demonstration, Ann was asked if she wanted to leave her details on the system which held 3,000 jobs. She decided to do it and was later contacted to say someone was interested in her. When Ann asked who it was, it turned out to be a friend, Iann Barron who had formed Computer Technology Ltd, CTL had developed a minicomputer. Ann says: “It didn’t need air conditioning. It was about the size of a desk.”

Ann went for an interview expecting to have a laugh with Iann but was interviewed by the Chairman Tom Margeson who was famous for explaining all things computer on TV. Ann had heard that they were inventing things but not selling much so she told him that she did not want to work for the company, describing it as “a mad magician’s workshop”. The role was to sell the systems as they felt that her knowledge of how commerce worked in England would be beneficial. However, Ann stood firm and said she only wanted to work on the technical side. All of her demands for a high salary, school holiday flexibility were met and Ann accepted a job. She says: “I accepted the job and when I got there I realised that Iann was brilliant, but it was really like a mad magician’s workshop, everybody was working on different systems, they weren’t coming together. They’d sold a lot of systems which had Iann’s computer (the Modular 1) at the centre, but they’d sold peripherals that didn’t work on this computer, so they couldn’t deliver. It was really quite a mess.”

Ann tells of how Iann used to talk to his senior staff about what the future was going to be. She adds: “One day he said, ‘you think the Modular 1 is small, but one day there’ll be smaller computers than that and they’ll be the size of house bricks and in lifts, cars, houses, in your cooker and things like that. We just didn’t believe that.”

Having grown fed up with working in a ‘mad magician’s workshop’, in 1974, Ann moved to Scicon, a computer subsidiary of British Petroleum which was mainly operations research oriented. She says of the move: “I was now out into the big wide world and worked only with men. They were so masculine, the most important thing to do in the day was to go and have a good lunch with your client. They didn’t work very hard but they charged lots of money.”

Ann was given a project to rationalise the computer systems to run British Steel. She explains: “In those days British Steel was about 200 small steelworks all round the country and they wanted it rationalised to five steelworks all doing specialised things and they wanted a computer system to manage that system. I was asked to do a study of the programming languages and the database management systems we should use etc.” Ann describes the project manager as “a doddery old man”. When she told her manager that she could manage the project better she was asked: “Have you ever met the man who manages the British Steel side?  He is also a doddery old man, that’s why we have our doddery old man to talk to their doddery old man and that’s how we get the business”.

Ann’s next role came when two Australians from the Computer Sciences of Australia, asked BCS if they knew of anyone who understood databases. Ann’s name was put forward. Despite not wanting to move to Australia because her husband had left her and she was now a single mum bringing up 2 children and needed the support of her family, Ann went to the interview and was offered the job. When she rejected it because of the move to the other side of the world, she was offered double the original salary. It was at this point that Ann realised that they were serious. She decided to take a couple of months to do some travelling and combine it with a visit to Australia. She also researched what the salary was worth by visiting the Bank of New South Wales in the Strand where the teller called the manager to help her. To her surprise, upon seeing the offer letter and salary, the manager asked her is she was a brain surgeon. She explains: “I told him I worked in computers and he told me that this salary is the sort of salary that we’d pay one of our top managers in one of our largest branches. Women don’t earn this money, not in Australia.”

On her arrival in Australia, Ann was taken to Canberra to meet the top officials of the Government. She was asked to find out why the then largest project in Australia that CSA was building for AMP was not working. Having carefully examined the system, Ann wrote a report saying that she could not find fault with the database element of the project.

She says: “I was hauled up in front of the managing director and told they were sorry they’d hired me, they’d made a mistake when they’d hired this stupid woman because they knew that things were wrong and they knew it was in the database area, and they thought I was an expert, but I obviously wasn’t. I had a two-year contract and a very high salary, so they put me in a very big office by myself and didn’t talk to me.” Ann decided that there was something wrong but not with the database system and she set out discover what it was.

Her investigation led her to the discovery that a young man had been trying to build something akin to British Telecom’s videotext and IBM’s Prestel. Ann says: “He had found a company to build this system when Telecom decided it could not afford to build it.  He was building it with a whole team on AMP’s money.  The problem was that it had to be very closely integrated with the operating system on AMP’s Univac computer. Univac kept on putting out new releases and every time they put out a new release of the operating system he had to retrofit his system. He often made mistakes and messed up the operating system and so the applications that were being built for AMP just didn’t work. The real problem was that computers weren’t capable of building a packet switching system yet.”

Having discovered this, and seeing no future for herself, Ann decided to return to the UK. She says: “I decided that what I needed to do was tell the head of AMP that that the way the system is being built it’ll never, never work.” However, the General Manager would not see Ann, so she went to his Deputy. He told Ann how disappointed they were and accused her of not being a computer expert because she could not help with their problem.

Ann responded by saying: “I’m going back to England.  I know why everything’s wrong because you’re on the wrong side of the earth and the blood runs to your head, you’re upside down. He looked at me in absolute amazement.  I asked him how could the board approvals for the project be six million dollars and the system to date had cost 12 million dollars. I told him it’ll never work, then as I left the room, I slammed the door.”

A week later, Ann was called back into the Deputy’s office for morning tea. He proceeded to ask Ann to give him an estimate of what it would cost to get the system working. Ann worked in the office to next him and presented him with an estimate of 60 million dollars, when he asked her to double check it, she found it actually would come to 64 million dollars. Ann says that they had by this time become friends, bonding over their interest in making jam. He eventually presented it to the board, with Ann’s advice that it would never work. Ann adds: “To my sadness they didn’t stop building this system and when they cancelled the system it had cost 96 million dollars.”

However, Ann was offered a job working directly for AMP rather than their subsidiary. She was offered more money, plus a two percent mortgage and was the only woman executive in that company for eight of the years that she worked there.

 She says: “I did everything for them.  I like managing projects, so I managed a lot of the applications projects.  I looked for and set up a new computer centre because their computer centre was in the offices of the subsidiary.” The company switched back to IBM computers from Univac, Ann was asked to draw up a proposal for the change. She says: “I was asked to sit in on the presentation to the Executive committee in case somebody asked awkward questions. When my boss had finished his presentation and it was all agreed, the Chairman of the board asked me if I had anything to add, so I said, ‘Just because you’ve got different initials on the side of your box doesn’t mean to say that you can’t make a mess like you did before, but I think IBM is such a strong company it wouldn’t let you make that mess’.  When I got outside my boss said to me, ‘When the Chairman asks is there anything else you want to say, you say, no sir, thank you sir, you don’t make a comment’.  An example of how women do things differently.”

As a senior woman in AMP, Ann found herself doing jobs that nobody else wanted and that she did not particularly enjoy. However, she was also made the company’s futurist, which she did enjoy greatly.  Ann says: “We had a strategist who looked at computing to five years out, but I looked at computing from five years to 25 years out, so that I could stop AMP from doing something now that would preclude them from getting involved in the future. That was a wonderful job because I spent my life going round the world talking to people at universities, talking to hardware suppliers, finding out the latest in computing, which was just fantastic.”

 It was while she was sourcing 200 programmers via a headhunting company to meet the company’s strategic plan, that Ann found herself being headhunted and accepted a job at the Australian Stock Exchange.

In 1987, Ann moved to the Australian Stock Exchange. In Australia, the Stock Exchanges consisted of a different Stock Exchange with different rules in each state.  However, it had plans to be the major  Stock Exchange for the Asian-Pacific region and so by an Act of Parliament, in April 1967, one Stock Exchange was formed. Ann’s role was to integrate the diverse technical equipment from each of the States and develop a strategic plan to take the Stock Exchange to the year 2000.

The Exchange’s new automated trading system was launched on the day before the crash of October 1987. However, Ann had tested and tested the system over and over.  She says: “I’m a stickler for testing because women don’t want to be caught out doing the wrong thing, so they test and test and test and test until they’re blue in the face, until they’re sure that there’s nothing wrong.” The ‘front end of the system that turned the ‘batch’ system into a realtime automated trading system, being built by external consultants, was late and because Ann joined the project late in the day and insisted upon rigorous testing, she became “that silly woman that they’d hired who does nothing but test, why can’t she make the automated trading system work.”

The system launched as stock markets fell around the world. Ann adds: “The trading was just massive, we had more trading that day than we had ever had, more than we thought the computer would have to cope with.  One by one, as other world exchange’s opened up, their exchanges dropped their computers couldn’t cope with the load and fell over.  As we went round the world we were getting news that all the Stock Exchanges were failing, but ours was still working!  So I was now an absolute hero because Australia’s was the only Stock Exchange in the world still working.” Unfortunately, after the crash, the value of the market dropped by a half and they could not afford to continue with the new system. Ann was made redundant. She says: “That hurt me a lot. I was 48, I’d got this fabulous job with an enormous salary, I’d been going, travelling round the world again for the Stock Exchange and I thought where will I get a job like this?  I won’t get a job like this, especially when I’m 48, I’m a woman.” Ann took a month off and visited her daughter, upon her return, she found twelve job offer letters waiting for her, she adds: “So it wasn’t hard at all to get another job”.

However, Ann’s new job did not work out the way that she hoped. Ann says: “I picked the wrong one. I picked it because I liked the Managing Director and he promised me great things.  It was a software house, and that’s what I really wanted to work for. However, he put a manager who didn’t like women in between him and me. There was another woman working for the company and gradually we weren’t allowed into management meetings and we were dropped down the hierarchy and so on. It was the same old story.”

Ann was invited to take over a role for a system set up by her friend based at New South Wales University where IBM had outsourced all their customer and internal training to the universities. The company brought in money for the university and could pay the academics involved at a better rate than their academic pay, in addition, the university gave them days off to do this work which allowed them to talk to real customers Ann adds: “It was a really good system, good for the university, good or for the academics, it was a good thing for IBM.  The whole thing really worked very well.”

Ann decided that this was also an opportunity to get her first degree, something that she had never had time to do following her cycling accident. However, the university rejected her and said that she would need to go straight into a Masters. Ann adds: “Of course what I really wanted to do was to get a PhD, so I quickly commuted my Masters degree to a PhD.”  Ann’s PhD thesis was beset with issues and she eventually abandoned it, she was awarded an honorary Doctorate.

Ann joined BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, in 1960 when it was first started and was then known as the London Group. She attended all the meetings she could in order to learn. She says of the meetings: “It was so exciting.  Everybody would come and talk about the jobs they were doing.  People were very helpful. They would share with you what they’d done; it was very collegiate. I was often the only woman there.”

Asked about the 1966 Donald Davies talk at the National Physics Laboratory, Ann says: “I was amazed when I heard what was going on.  It was a special Computer Society talk held at the National Physical Laboratory. Donald Davies was working on what we later came to call packet switching.  The idea was to send packets of data (files of data) across the world using computers on telephone lines. It was just amazing that somebody was thinking about this. I thought if we could merge together computers and telephone lines it would open up just such an interesting possibilities.”

Ann says this type of talk was what the Computer Society was really good at, adding: “It was good at knowing where the work was being done and picking out people who were doing interesting things and then asking them to speak at Computer Society meetings.”

In 1968 Ann became the Chair of the British Computer Society’s Working Group on Database Design. She says: “Databases were hot stuff in those days, before that all we had were sequential files and most files were on magnetic tape, but along came random access disks, so we could build bigger files. They needed to be organised.” CODASYL extensions to COBOL were developed to do that, as Ann explains: “COBOL, was the language that most commercial companies used in those days.”

Being Chair of the BCS group “opened all sorts of doors” for Ann, she says: “I was often asked to talk to companies about what databases were. I managed to secure quite a big contract for fpl on that subject. …The database working group was a subsidiary of the BCS Advance programming Group.  There was another woman in the group, Marilyn Tribe from the Prudential Insurance; Marilyn and I were the only women in this group.”

In 1970 Ann became adviser of the British Science Museum’s first computing gallery having been nominated for the role by BCS. She says: “It was fascinating. For instance, they had pieces of the Babbage machine there, it was beautifully engineered.” The machine on view worked with a handle, but the original design had been for it to work by steam.  Ann continues: “I used to take my children with me and they played with the Babbage machine. We decided that what we needed to do was to show ordinary people how computers worked.” As a result, one of FPL’s programmers wrote a system to help users of the London Underground which allowed individuals to work out the changes they needed to make to travel from one destination to another. Ann adds: “This was really new stuff in those days, as a visitor to the Science Museum could walk up to a teletype terminal, there were no VDUs in those days, and type I want to go from here to there, and it would tell you your route and the approximate time that route would take. People thought that was absolute magic.”

In October 1973 Ann met Captain Grace Hopper, who was in the American Navy and invented COBOL. Ann says she “was one of those women like Jean Sammet that you held in high esteem; one of women who’d really changed the world.”

On retiring from the USA Navy as a Rear Admiral, Univac appointed Grace Hopper as an ambassador to travel the world talking about computing and computer technology. When she came to England, as the only woman on BCS’ Council, Ann was given the role of hosting Hopper. Ann says: “She never wore anything but her American Navy uniforms and when she gave a talk she always said, I’m very proud to have contributed to the computer industry, but not nearly as proud as I am to wear this American Navy uniform.  She was very, very ladylike. I was fascinated to hear about the latest developments in Computing.”

After speaking at a meeting of the BCS Advance Programming Group, Hopper asked if they would like to see the latest computer. Ann explains: “She had a huge Navy issue handbag which she burrowed into and brought out a box that was about the size of a cigarette packet. We said, that’s a computer?  She said, no, that’s just the box. She opened the box and she brought out something about the size of a matchbox and said this is the computer. We looked at it in amazement and asked where are the peripherals, how do you link to it?  If someone can go and find me a teletype and a printer, she said, I’ll show you.” With the necessary equipment found, Hopper was asked how it was plugged in. Ann continues:  “It was what we now know is a chip, we didn’t know then, she pulled out a fine wire about from the side of the device it was about a hair’s width and then after more rummaging in her handbag, she brought out a huge transformer, plugged the little wire into the transformer and plugged that into the normal electricity supply, and then showed us that it had the whole of the COBOL compiler on it and wrote a COBOL program in front of us and printed it out. That just blew us away. She told us that she thought the Mainframe was dead. The future was ‘multitudes of minis linked by telephone.”

Ann says that Hopper also always talked about the CODASYL system and how proud she was of it. She adds: “The fact that COBOL had now been extended and extended and could handle databases. I listened and gathered in the information she was happy to give me.”

In 1989, Ann founded Females in Information Technology and Telecommunication  (FiTT). She explains: “In Australia, I’d realised there weren’t many women in computing and they certainly weren’t in senior positions.  You could count the number of women in senior positions on the fingers of one hand. I’d been Chairman of the New South Wales branch of the Computer Society, which was the biggest branch, and I’d had a fair amount of publicity through AMP and through the Stock Exchange, and women were coming to me and saying, I hate it where I work. Their main beef was that they were watching the men get jobs that they wanted and they didn’t feel valued. They also had a work-life balance issue and a lot of them had put off having their babies and now they were too old, or they didn’t want to leave work and have children and so on.  A myriad of problems that women seem to have today too.  I realised that I couldn’t solve their problems, but if they’d talk to each other they’d find that they all had similar problems and could share how they’d solved them in different ways.  So I started FiTT and I had three philosophies.  One was that it wasn’t to have a membership fee, because I found that the women who needed things most were women who had not so much money, they were single mums, they were struggling and didn’t have money to spend on themselves.  It wasn’t to be a hierarchy like the men have hierarchies with somebody at the top, it was to be a network, everybody was to be equal, everybody was to share and thirdly it would help any woman understand computers even if she didn’t work in the industry.” Today, FiTT is 4,000 women strong and has plenty of sponsors to help them host events and provide a free network for women.

From her work with FiTT, Ann discovered the Queen Bee Effect, where woman reach the top but then only have men reporting into them to make themselves look more powerful.  She says: “I thought that was disgusting, and I understand that still goes on to a certain extent. They say it’s called the Queen Bee Effect because once you get to be queen bee you don’t want to let anybody else take your place.  I hope it’s not so prevalent now, but I understand it is.”

Now in her eighties, Ann says of life: “I have just had a ball.  I’ve just been paid lots and lots of money for having great fun. It’s allowed me to bring up my children, it’s allowed me to indulge my love of travel, I’ve been all over the world in my job”

Of decisions she has made in her life, Ann says that coming to Australia was one of the major ones, she adds: “It was quite a career change and although it was hard and although, technical women weren’t respected in Australia, I really have enjoyed my working time in Australia. There were ups and downs, I was made redundant when I was 48 and then I was made redundant again when I was 54. I thought I’ll never get a job now, so I started my own company, which was great fun and very profitable. That was a highlight. Another highlight was being one of the only Stock Exchanges to stay working through the ’87 crash. Setting up FiTT was important.  Women are now talking to each other, they are now learning from each other, and are developing strategies which help them work in a “man’s world”.  They don’t all want to get to the top, but they do want to be respected and they do want to enjoy the work they’re doing and be valued in what they’re doing and be paid the right amount of money for what they’re doing. ”

Ann was inducted into the Australian Computer Society’s Hall of Fame in 2002 and into the Pearcey Hall of Fame in 2011. Ann published her autobiography, ‘The IT Girl: 50 Years as a Woman Working in the Information Technology Industry’, in 2020.

Ann offers the following advice to women who are considering working in IT: “Realise that you can do it. A lot of women don’t have self-confidence, they think it’s a man’s thing. Women can do technical jobs too. Just talk to other women, and men, and find out what other people are doing, how they can be valued.

“Stand up for yourself. I’ve never asked for an increase in salary ever, I’ve always been given any increases that I’ve got.

“If you think you’re in the wrong job, leave it and go for another job. Don’t be frightened, don’t think that if I leave this job I’ll never get another job as good, because you will.  Network, network; women are very good at networking.”

Interviewed by Elisabetta Mori

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Linda Feeley