Born Vera Buchthal in Germany, Steve Shirley arrived at Liverpool Street station in London in 1939, aged five, as one of 10,000 mostly Jewish children brought to Britain under the Kindertransport programme. She later took the name Stephanie Brook, and married Derek Shirley in 1959. "Steve" was a family nickname she adopted for business correspondence after discovering that letters signed with a male name drew far more responses from potential clients.
Shirley worked at Dollis Hill Research Centre, where she helped devise electronic telephone exchanges and worked on Ernie, the computer that randomly selected winning Premium Bond holders. She earned a mathematics degree through six years of evening classes while employed there. She had earlier attended a boys' school to study mathematics, no girls' school offering the subject at her level.
She moved to Computer Developments Ltd (CDL), where she developed software for the ICT 1301, one of the first mass-produced transistor computers. In 1962, after being told at a meeting that her point was nothing to do with her, she quit and founded Freelance Programmers from her dining table with £6 in capital.
The company employed university-educated women who had been laid off upon marrying or becoming pregnant, offering coding and data-input work from home with flexible hours and piecework. Of 300 employees initially recruited, 297 were women. The firm's management-control protocols were adopted by NATO, and it programmed the black-box flight recorder for Concorde. By the 1990s, when it was floated, the company employed 8,500 people; by 2000 it was valued at $3bn.
Before retiring in 1993, Shirley gave most of her stake in the company to her staff, ultimately creating 70 millionaires.
Shirley's only child, Giles, was diagnosed as severely autistic and later developed epilepsy. In 1994 she opened Autism at Kingwood, a supported-living centre, with Giles as its first resident. He died four years later of an epileptic seizure.
Most of her fortune went to autism causes, including Autistica and the National Autistic Society. In 2001 she became a founding donor of the Oxford Internet Institute, set up to consider the social and ethical implications of the internet.
By 2017 Shirley was a dame and a Companion of Honour, both for services to IT and philanthropy.
She died on August 9th 2025, aged 91.
For children with short attention spans: boomerangs that don't come back.