career story: The importance of being ERNIE |
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| Authors: | Stephanie Shirley |
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| Institution: | Past President of the British Computer Society, first Master of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists—retired from Xansa in 1993, was appointed DBE in 2000 and is currently a full-time philanthropist in the field of autism spectrum disorders. |
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| Abstract: | ERNIE is the Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment that caused huge interest in 1957 when it began selecting prize-winners for the new Premium Bonds, the first government-sponsored gamble in Britain in modern times. Stephanie Shirley was a young statistician working on ERNIE. Today, as Steve Shirley or Dame Stephanie , she is one of the wealthiest women in Britain—not through winning on Premium Bonds herself, but through the pioneering software company she formed which, for the first time, gave female-friendly employment to women programmers (and statisticians) who had children and dependants at home to care for. She is now a major philanthropist and a driving force for research into the social effects of the Internet and into autism. She has given more than £50 million to charities in those fields. Julian Champkin interviews her. |
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