Cicely Popplewell

Cicely Mary Williams (née Popplewell) 29 October 1920 – 20 June 1995 was a British software engineer who worked with Alan Turing on the Manchester Mark 1 computer.

Cicely Williams
Born
Cicely Mary Popplewell

29 October 1920 (1920-10-29)
Stockport, England
Died1995 (aged 74–75)
Buxton, England
Alma materUniversity of Cambridge (BA, MA)
Known forWork on Manchester Mark 1 and Ferranti Mark 1
Spouse(s)George Keith Williams
Scientific career
FieldsSoftware engineering
InstitutionsUniversity of Manchester
InfluencesAlan Turing

Early life and education

Popplewell was born on 29 October 1920 in Stockport, England.[1] Her parents were Bessie (née Fazakerley) and Alfred Popplewell, a chartered accountant. She attended Sherbrook Private Girls School at Greaves Hall in Lancashire.[2]

She studied the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge[3][4] where she worked with statistics in the form of punched cards.[3] She was considered an expert in the Brunsviga desk calculator.[5]

She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1942, which was converted to a Master of Arts degree in 1949 from Girton College, Cambridge.[6][7]

Career

In 1943 she was a Technical Assistant in the Experimental Department at Rolls Royce Ltd. and joined the Women's Engineering Society.[4]

In 1949 Popplewell joined Alan Turing in the Computer Machine Learning department at the University of Manchester to help with the programming of a prototype computer.[8][9] At first she shared an office with Turing and Audrey Bates, a University of Manchester mathematics graduate.[10][11] Her first role was to create a library for the prototype Manchester Mark 1.[12] This included input/output routines and mathematical functions, and a reciprocal square root routine.[12] She worked on ray tracing.[12] She wrote the first versions of sections of the subroutines for functions like COSINE.[13] Together they designed the programming language for the Ferranti Mark 1.[14][15]

She wrote the Programmers Handbook for the Ferranti Mark 1 in 1951, reworking Turing's programming manual to make it comprehensible.[16][17] Whilst Turing worked on Scheme A, an early operating system, Popplewell proposed Scheme B, which allowed for decimal numbers, in 1952.[18][19]

Popplewell went on to become an advisor and administrator in the newly formed University of Manchester Computing Service where she was remembered as a 'universally liked' mother-figure.[20] She left the Service in the late 1960s shortly before her marriage.[17]

Popplewell taught the first ever programming class in Argentina at the University of Buenos Aires in 1961.[21][22][23] Her class there included the computer scientist Cecilia Berdichevsky.[21] She was supported by the British Council.[24]

Popplewell published the textbook Information Processing in 1962.[25]

Her life was documented in Jonathan Swinton's 2019 book Alan Turing’s Manchester.[13][26]

Personal life

In 1969 Popplewell married George Keith Williams in Chapel-en-le-Frith.[27] She died in 1995 in Buxton, England.

References
  1. "Ancestry – birth record". www.ancestry.co.uk. Retrieved 2020-01-18.
  2. "Greaves Hall – The history of Greaves Hall, Banks, Nr Southport". northmeols.com. Retrieved 2018-12-18.
  3. Hodges, Andrew (2014). Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game – Updated Edition. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9781400865123.
  4. "The Woman Engineer". www2.theiet.org. Retrieved 2020-01-18.
  5. "Interview:David, Mike". chilton-computing.org.uk. Retrieved 2018-12-18.
  6. https://twitter.com/theUL/status/1076092273933340673
  7. "The Cambridge University list of members". cam.ac.uk. 1974.
  8. "The Manchester Mark 1 (Digital 60)". curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk. Retrieved 2018-12-18.
  9. Anon. "Catalogue of historical computer documents donated by Professor D B G Edwards" (PDF). Retrieved 2018-12-18.
  10. Lavington, Simon (2012). Alan Turing and His Contemporaries: Building the World's First Computers. BCS, The Chartered Institute. ISBN 9781780171050.
  11. "Alan Turing Scrapbook – Manchester Computers". turing.org.uk. Retrieved 2018-12-18.
  12. Campbell-Kelly, Martin (1980). "Programming the Mark I: Early Programming Activity at the University of Manchester". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 2 (2): 130–168. doi:10.1109/mahc.1980.10018. ISSN 1058-6180. S2CID 10845153.
  13. "Women at the Console". University Histories. 2019-03-15. Retrieved 2019-03-22.
  14. "HOPL". hopl.info. Archived from the original on 2018-12-19. Retrieved 2018-12-18.
  15. "Alan Turing – Mathematician, war time code breaker, pioneer of computer science and in charge of Hut 8". 1stassociated.co.uk. Retrieved 2018-12-18.
  16. "Turing Manual". curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk. Retrieved 2018-12-18.
  17. "Women at the console". Alan Turing's Manchester. Retrieved 2021-01-18.
  18. "The Rutherford Journal – The New Zealand Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology". rutherfordjournal.org. Retrieved 2018-12-18.
  19. "Full text of "A history of Manchester computers (book)"". archive.org. Retrieved 2018-12-18.
  20. Swinton, Jonathan (2019). Alan Turing's Manchester. Manchester: Infang Publishing. p. 119. ISBN 978-0-9931789-2-4.
  21. Berdichevsky, Cecilia (2006), "The Beginning of Computer Science in Argentina — Clementina – (1961–1966)", History of Computing and Education 2 (HCE2), IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, 215, Springer US, pp. 203–215, doi:10.1007/978-0-387-34741-7_15, ISBN 9780387346373
  22. Impagliazzo, John (2006-07-27). History of Computing and Education 2 (HCE2): IFIP 19th World Computer Congress, WG 9.7, TC 9: History of Computing, Proceedings of the Second Conference on the History of Computing and Education, August 21–24, Santiago, Chile. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 9780387346373.
  23. Leal, Luis Germán Rodríguez; Carnota, Raúl (2015-11-01). Historias de las TIC en América Latina y el Caribe: Inicios, desarrollos y rupturas (in Spanish). Fundación Telefónica. ISBN 9789802715282.
  24. Carnota, Raul Jorge (2015). "The Beginning of Computer Science in Argentina and the Calculus Institute, 1957-1970". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 37 (4): 40–52. doi:10.1109/mahc.2015.34. ISSN 1058-6180. S2CID 16163838.
  25. "Information Processing 1962: Amazon.co.uk: Cicely M Popplewell: Books". amazon.co.uk. Retrieved 2018-12-18.
  26. "Alan Turing's Manchester". The Portico Library. Retrieved 2019-03-22.
  27. "Ancestry – Sign In". ancestry.com. Retrieved 2018-12-19.
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