A woman who wanted to be a lawyer was told in the 1950s that law was no place for women. So she became a computer programmer instead.
She designed the operating system for what is now recognized as the world's first personal computer. She programmed it from her parents' living room in Baltimore, twelve years before the Apple II existed. Then she quit computing, went to Harvard Law School, and became a lawyer anyway.
Her name is Mary Allen Wilkes.
Here is the story because the first person in history to use a personal computer at home is a woman almost nobody in tech can name.
Mary was born on September 25, 1937 in Chicago, Illinois. She grew up wanting to practice law. In eighth grade her geography teacher gave her different advice. He told her she should become a computer programmer. She filed the suggestion away.
She went to Wellesley College and graduated in 1959 with a major in philosophy and theology. She still wanted to be a lawyer. But her professors and peers told her the same thing. Law was extremely difficult for women. The profession would not welcome her. She remembered what her geography teacher had said.
She applied to MIT. No coding test was required. No experience was necessary. She had studied logic and philosophy, which was enough to pass the entrance assessment. In 1959 she started at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory as a programmer on the IBM 704 and IBM 709.
Then she joined the team building something nobody had a name for yet.
The machine was called LINC, short for Laboratory Instrument Computer. It was designed by Wesley A. Clark to give biomedical researchers their own dedicated computer, one that could sit in a lab instead of a sealed room behind glass. It had a screen, a keyboard, toggle switches, and magnetic tape drives. It was small enough for one person to operate. It is now recognized by many historians as the world's first personal computer.
Mary designed the console. She wrote the first operating system. She kept refining it through multiple versions, all named with the prefix LAP. She co-authored the programming manual with Clark. She became one of the most important engineers on the project.
In the summer of 1964 the core LINC team left MIT to form the Computer Systems Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis. Mary did not want to relocate. Her mother was ill. So Washington University did something unprecedented. They shipped a LINC computer to her parents' home in Baltimore.
A 250-pound laboratory computer was installed in the living room of a clergyman's house. Her father loved it. Mary sat down and programmed from home.
From 1964 to 1965 she developed LAP6, the interactive operating system that made the LINC usable by scientists who were not computer specialists. She described it in a 1970 paper in Communications of the ACM as a system for "conversational access to a 2048-word machine." She also published a paper in IEEE Transactions on Computers describing an on-line text editing algorithm she had designed, one of the earliest document editing systems ever built.
She was the first person in history to use a personal computer in a private home. The Apple II would not reach buyers until 1977. She had done it twelve years earlier.
She stayed in computing for 11 years. She described the work as intellectually stimulating but socially isolating. Then in 1972 she did what she had always wanted to do.
She enrolled at Harvard Law School.
She practiced law in the Boston area for over 35 years. She served as a trial lawyer. She served as an Assistant District Attorney for Middlesex County. She was an arbitrator for the American Arbitration Association. She taught in the Trial Advocacy Workshop at Harvard Law School. She judged an international moot court competition in Vienna for eight years.
In 2013 Great Britain's National Museum of Computing featured her in its "Heroines of Computing" exhibition at Bletchley Park. In 2019 she gave a standing-room-only talk at Wellesley's computer science colloquium about her work on the LINC.
A woman who was told she could not be a lawyer became a pioneer of personal computing from her parents' living room, then quit and became a lawyer anyway.
She once said, "We had the quaint notion at the time that software should be completely, absolutely free of bugs.
Unfortunately it's a notion that never really quite caught on.