My brother-in-law Don Hunter, who has died aged 93, was a physicist who worked on some of the first electronic computers in the Rutherford Laboratory at Cambridge University and later helped set up one of the first major computer software companies in the UK. Don worked as a research assistant in the maths department of the Rutherford Laboratory from 1949 until 1952. There he was involved in pioneering work on the electronic delay storage automatic calculator (Edsac 1) computer. In 1955 he took up a research post at the Standard Telecommunication Laboratories (STL) in Harlow, Essex, where he was part of the design team for a computer called Step 1. Later, in a collaboration between STL and a Dutch subsidiary, he was involved in the development of Zebra, another early computer. During this time, Don worked in Paris, New York and Italy; he spoke fluent French and Italian.