[1] Boestad-Nilsson was born on 25 November 1925 in Stockholm, the daughter of mechanical engineering professor Gustav Boestad [sv].
[1] BESK, Sweden's second computer, was based on vacuum tube technology instead of relays, and began operations in 1954, with Boestad-Nilsson as one of its initial programmers.
[1][5] Among other projects, the BESK computer, and Boestad-Nilsson's calculations on it, were used in the Swedish nuclear weapons program.
[4][5] At around this time, she became an activist for women's rights, through the Fredrika Bremer Association, in reaction to a 1975 FOA personnel memo that recommended paying all women employees (including managers such as her) equal low rates of pay, in order to prevent them from becoming jealous of each other.
She left FOA in 1981 to work for an organization promoting the use of the Ada programming language, and retired in 1990.