Steve Shirley

Software services from home, 1962. Shirley, who arrived in Britain as a child refugee on the Kindertransport, founded Freelance Programmers from her dining table in 1962, employing mainly women programmers working part-time from home, an early model of remote work. It wrote software for clients such as the Concorde project and grew into the listed Xansa, partly owned by its staff. She signed letters as Steve to get replies. She died in 2025.