Dina St Johnston

Born: 1930

Died: 2007

Dina St. Johnston was born Aldrina Nia Vaughan in 1930. She left school at age 17 and began working at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association. While there, she continued her studies on a part-time basis. In 1953 she went to work at the Borehamwood Laboratories of Elliott Brothers, an early computer company that had produced its first computer in 1950. It was here, and through the Cambridge Summer School on Programming, that Dina learned how to program. She would go on to work on EDSAC and the Elliott 400 and 800 series.

Dina recognised a gap in the market when she realised that there were no independent software companies selling programmes directly to industry. “There was a shortage of processor-oriented people who were happy to go round a steel works in a hard hat,” she said, so she founded Vaughan Programming Services in 1959.

Vaughan was the first software house in the UK and was the beginning of the independent software industry. Up until this point there had been no companies that were not part of a computer manufacturer or a computer bureau that existed exclusively to create tailor-made software for its clients. Dina produced software for companies like the BBC, Unilever, and GEC, flight simulators for the RAF, and software that provided real-time information for passengers on British Rail, the type of work for which the company became most well known.

Dina was still programming until the mid 1990s.