Allen William Mark (Doc) Coombs (23 October 1911 – 30 January 1995) was a British electronics engineer at the Post Office Research Station, Dollis Hill.
Professor Brian Randell was researching the history of computer science in Britain for a conference on the history of computing held at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico on 10-15 June 1976, and got permission to present a paper on wartime development of the COLOSSI at the Post Office Research Station, Dollis Hill (in October 1975 the British Government released a series of captioned photographs from the Public Record Office).
The interest in the “revelations” in his paper resulted in a special evening meeting when Randell and Cooombs answered further questions.
Coombs later wrote that no member of our team could ever forget the fellowship, the sense of purpose and, above all, the breathless excitement of those days.
Coombs headed the scientific side of R14, the division working on optical character recognition for postal mechanisation, which moved to the new BT Research Centre at Martlesham in Suffolk.