The Stourbridge genius who changed the future of computing
SHE may not have been a household name, but Kathleen Booth, who died this autumn at the age of 100, played a huge role in the history of the computer. And she was one of the Black Country’s own.
She was born Kathleen Hylda Valerie Britten, on July 9, 1922, in Stourbridge, and went on to change the course of computing. These days many of us have a translation app in our smartphones, but it would be wrong to think this was a recent idea. Kathleen Booth programmed a computer to translate French into English way back in 1955 – when a computer with the power of a modern phone would fill most of a warehouse.
She was one of the pioneers of Artificial Intelligence, and together with her husband, Andrew Booth, she co-designed early computers at a time when only huge companies, research institutes and governments could afford or operate them. They created the pioneering Simple Electric Computer and the All Purpose Electric Computer, knwn as Apexc. The British-built ITC 1200, the UK’S best selling model in the early 1960s, was based directly on the Apexc.
The Booths also came up with the ‘Booth Multiplier Algorithm’ which others could use to construct far more powerful computers than ever before. But Kathleen’s chief claim to computing greatness was her invention of the first ‘assembly language.’ Prior to this, programming a computer would require the rewiring of dozens of cables and changing of switches to send signals along different circuits.
Kathleen co-founded the School of Computer Science and Information Systems in 1957 at Birkbeck College and taught her own course there. She was also one of the first women to write a book on the building of computers – Programming for an Automatic Digital Calculator was published in 1958 – long before the general public were even aware that an electrical device could perform arithmetic. Kathleen’s extraordinary ability in this new science was rooted in her love of numbers – she claimed that mathematics was ‘more pleasant to study than languages.’ These days there is much talk of ‘computer learning,’ where machines are programmed to learn from experience rather than being instructed directly. But it’s far from a new idea – Kathleen Booth developed a computer programme to simulate the way animals recognise patterns in nature in the early 1960s.
The Booths moved together to Canada in 1962 to continue their work, and though Kathleen retired in 1978, she was still working in 1993 – her last published work, ‘Using neural networks to identify Marine Mammals,’ was cowritten with her son, when she was 71.
Kathleen Booth died, aged 100, on September 29
She programmed a computer to translate French into English way back in 1955