Dina St Johnston - A Formidable Lady (In person and Webinar)
Dina St Johnston (1930-2007), founder of the UK's first software house
About
Dina St Johnston (neé Vaughan) left school at 16, studied for a Mathematics degree part-time and joined Elliott-Automation in 1953. She became the only female in a team of seven programmers. She proved herself a star, being entrusted to write the software for a classified defence project as well as for the first business computer to be installed by a municipal authority (Norwich City Council, in 1956). Dina left Elliott-Automation in 1958 to start her own company, Vaughan Programming Services. VPS was the first independent software company in the UK that was not a part of a computer manufacturer, not a part of a computer bureau nor a users’ organisation and not a part of a consultancy operation. VPS flourished, eventually employing a hundred people and designing and building its own computer for real-time control applications. The company was sold to an American consortium in 1996. In this talk we will illustrate some of Dina’s projects and set her life in the context of about 50 other British women pioneers who started work as computer programmers in the period 1949 to 1959.
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Continuing Professional Development
This event can contribute towards your Continuing Professional Development (CPD) hours as part of the IET's CPD monitoring scheme.
13 Feb 2025
7:00pm - 8:15pm
Organiser
- Anglian Coastal Local Network
Registration information
This is a Hybrid event. Please use the following registration links:-
In person https://localevents.theiet.org/5b569a
Speakers
Simon Lavington
Emeritus Professor - University of Essex
Simon is emeritus professor of Computer Science at the University of Essex. A graduate of ManchesterUniversity, he has worked on high-performance computer architectures and on hardware support for knowledge-based systems. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and of the British Computer Society and is the Digital Archivist for the Computer Conservation Society. He has published many books and journal papers, most of which now gather dust. Simon retired in 2002 and pursues computer history as a hobby
Programme
This is a Hybrid event, held in Person in the Atrium Lecture Theatre at the University of Suffolk and broadcast from there as a webinar.
The event will start promptl;y at 19:00. Please allow a few minutes to log in.
There will be a Q&A at approx 19:45
The event will finish by 20:15