Festival Day

Dr Laura James

Welcome

Getting Wuthering Bytes 2024 off to a start with a welcome from compère, Dr Laura James.

Loula Yorke

Zen and the Art of Modular Synthesis

From 60s counterculture to the digital age, this talk charts the evolution of modular synthesis: an early form of music technology that shows no signs of slowing down. Loula aims to demystify this 'dark art' by breaking it down to its most basic principles and showing how she learned to make music by letting go.

Professor Simon Lavington

A Formidable Lady: Dina St Johnston (1930 – 2007), founder of the UK’s first Software House

Dina St Johnston (neé Vaughan) left school at 16, studied for a Mathematics degree part-time and joined Elliott-Automation in 1953. She became the only woman in a team of seven programmers. She proved herself a star, being entrusted to write the software for a classified defence project as well as for the first business computer to be installed by a municipal authority (Norwich City Council, in 1956).

Dina left Elliott-Automation in 1958 to start her own company, Vaughan Programming Services. VPS was the first independent software company in the UK that was not a part of a computer manufacturer, not a part of a computer bureau nor a users’ organisation and not a part of a consultancy operation. VPS flourished, eventually employing a hundred people and designing and building its own computer for real-time control applications. The company was sold to an American consortium in 1996. In this talk we will illustrate some of the projects on which Dina worked.