Kathleen Booth
Kathleen Booth (née Britten) is credited with writing the first assembly language and the design of the assembler and autocode (ARC and APE(X)C) for the first computer systems at Birkbeck College, University of London.[1]
Career
Kathleen Booth worked at Birkbeck College from 1946–62.[2] She traveled to the United States as Andrew Booth's research assistant in 1947, visiting with John von Neumann at Princeton.[3] Upon returning to the UK, she co-authored "General Considerations in the Design of an All Purpose Electronic Digital Computer," describing modifications to the original ARC redesign to the ARC2 using a von Neumann architecture.[2] Part of her contribution was the ARC assembly language.[4] She also built and maintained ARC components.[5]
Kathleen and Andrew Booth's team at Birkbeck were considered the smallest of the early British computer groups. From 1947 to 1953, they produced three machines: ARC, SEC, and APE(X)C. This was considered a remarkable achievement due the size of the group and the limited funds at its disposal. Although APE(X)C eventually led to the HEC series manufactured by the British Tabulating Machine Company, the small scale of the Birkbeck group did not place it in the front rank of British computer activity.[6]
Booth regularly published papers concerning her work on the ARC and APE(X)C systemsVorlage:Citation needed. She co-founded the School of Computer Science and Information Systems in 1957, along with Andrew Booth and J.C. Jennings.[2] In 1958, she taught a programming course.[2]
In 1958, Booth wrote a book describing how to program APE(X)C computers.[7]