Mary Lee Woods

After a period devoted to bringing up children, she became a schoolteacher of mathematics, and then a programmer using BASIC, Fortran and other languages before retiring in 1987.

Woods left Ferranti in 1955, when her first child was born. She continued to get involved in smaller programming projects, that she termed "cottage industry programming," so that she could complete jobs from home. Most notably she did some work with the London Transport Executive, to develop a simulation for bus routes that could prevent hold ups and bus bunching. She also developed a program for the RAF at Boscombe Down to track weather balloons and translate their readings. Then she came out of retirement in 1963 to work for a London-based company called K and H. While at K and H she wrote programming manuals until she retired in 1987.

In 1954 she married Conway Berners-Lee whom she met while working in the Ferranti team, and together they had four children; Timothy (Tim), Peter, Helen and Michael (Mike). Their eldest son, Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web, and their youngest son Mike is an academic.

Mary Lee Berners-Lee (née Woods; 12 March 1924 – 29 November 2017) was an English mathematician and computer scientist who worked in a team that developed programs in the Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester Mark 1, Ferranti Mark 1 and Mark 1 Star computers. She was the mother of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and Mike Berners-Lee, an English researcher and writer on greenhouse gases.

Woods was born on 12 March 1924, in Hall Green, Birmingham to Ida (née Burrows) and Bertie Woods. Both her parents were teachers. She had a brother who served in the Royal Air Force during World War II and was killed in action. She attended Yardley Grammar School in Yardley, Birmingham, where she developed an aptitude for mathematics. From 1942 to 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. After completing her degree she was offered a fellowship by Richard van der Riet Woolley to work at Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra, Australia, from 1947 to 1951 when she joined Ferranti in Manchester as a computer programmer.