Ann Hardy

In 2004, Hardy retired. She currently serves as co-chair of the Software Industry Special Interest Group at the Computer History Museum.

After Tymshare was acquired by McDonnell Douglas in 1984, she left to found KeyLogic, which sold the timesharing hardware and software developed at Tymshare, under a licensing arrangement, until changing market conditions forced its closure in the early 1990s. She subsequently co-founded Agorics, which focuses on web-based marketplace applications.

Hardy worked on some of the first time-sharing systems and computer networks, used by a variety of corporations and government agencies. In 1968 she, with her husband Norm Hardy and LaRoy Tymes, first used minicomputers to log onto mainframe computers. She eventually rose to vice-president, the first woman in that role. Though Hardy was solely responsible for the writing the code for Tymshare's time-sharing product, many of her male colleagues assumed her husband had written the OS. It wasn't until she was in the hospital giving birth to her first child, and her coworkers encountered problems that they did not know how to fix, that they began to defer to her as the expert on the system she had written.

Hardy married, and later divorced, Norman Hardy, also an alumnus of IBM and Tymshare. She has two daughters, born in 1968 and 1970; one became an environmentalist and the other a costume designer.

In February 1966, after her husband got a job at IBM in the Bay Area, Hardy got a job at Tymshare, a newly formed time-sharing company in Los Altos, California. She worked for Tymshare from 1966 to 1985.

A job on the STRETCH supercomputer project led to an offer to work at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in 1962. Hardy was one of a team of five who worked on the Livermore STRETCH's Fortran compiler from 1963 to 1966.

In 1956, Hardy entered the programming field after taking IBM's Programmer Aptitude Test. Her official title was System Service Girl, which is equivalent to the position of a current day system engineer. Hardy then switched to programming and worked in IBM Research, which was in Poughkeepsie, and then in Ossining, New York. She worked at IBM for five years.

In 1951, Hardy graduated from Evanston Township High School. In 1955, Hardy graduated from Pomona College with a degree in physical education. She chose physical education because it was the only degree program which allowed her to take math and science courses after her desire to major in chemistry was stymied by the chemistry department head who was opposed to having women in the lab. Following her graduation, she took chemistry classes at Columbia University, but ultimately decided that a career in physical therapy had little appeal. On the advice of a friend working for IBM, she took the company's Programmer Aptitude Test when searching for a job.

Ann Hardy (née Haley, born 20 April 1933) is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur, best known for her pioneering work on computer time-sharing systems while working at Tymshare from 1966 onwards.