RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language

[Pete Ross Junior]

RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language
The Register

Builder and programmer of the ARC and SEC turned 100 this year

Professor Kathleen Booth, one of the last of the early British computing pioneers, has died. She was 100.

Kathleen Hylda Valerie Britten was born in Worcestershire, England, on July 9, 1922. During the Second World War, she studied at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she got a BSc in mathematics in 1944. After graduating, she became a junior scientific officer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, a research organization in Farnborough. Two years later she moved to Birkbeck College, first as a research assistant, and later a lecturer and then research fellow.

She also worked at the British Rubber Producers' Research Association (BRPRA), where she met and worked with mathematician and physicist Andrew Donald Booth, who later became her husband. After studying with X-ray crystallographer Professor J D Bernal – inventor of the Bernal Sphere – A D Booth was working out crystal structures using X-ray diffraction data, and finding the manual calculations very tedious; he built an analog computer to automate part of this.



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[AllaN01Bear]

1. thank you.

[Pete Ross Junior]

2. The inventor of high level programming languages ...

Also a woman. Grace Hopper. The first two being Fortran and COBOL.

[Xipe Totec]

3. Let's not forget Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace

She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and to have published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is often regarded as the first computer programmer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

[niyad]

6. And Hedy Lamarr, the "Mother of WiFi".

[OnlinePoker]

9. COBOL, but not Fortran

She helped develop testing systems for implementation of COBOL and Fortran, but wasn't part of IBM's team that developed Fortran itself.

[NullTuples]

15. Minor correction: Kathleen Booth did not invent high level languages

Last edited Mon Oct 31, 2022, 02:44 PM - Edit history (1)

She created Assembly in 1947-ish for the ARC2. It was a step up from Machine Language that was just 1's and 0's. Assembly is 1 to 3 letter mnemonics for the 1's and 0's that make up the actual instructions a processor executes, plus memory locations in hindo-arabic (0-9, base 10) rather than binary (1 & 0, base 2). For example, instead of maybe seven or eight 1's and 0's, a program could simply contain the instruction keyword MOV followed by the source and destination memory locations. It saved typing, but more important it was easier to write without mistakes and much easier to read.

Fortran was created by IBM in '54 and COBOL in '57 from a language called FLOW-MATIC by Rear Admiral Grace Hopper & her group. They were natural extensions of Assembly, in my opinion as the leap had already been made to use a translator from human to computer (an interpreter or compiler)

[burrowowl]

4. RIP

[niyad]

5. Rest in power, brave spirit.

Would you consider cross-posting this in Women's Rights And Issues? Thanks in advance.

[BobTheSubgenius]

7. RIP to an indispensible link in the chain of modern life.

The Brits really had it going on in those days. And I bet she knew how to pronounce the name of her home town.

[Lucinda]

8. Thank you Ms Booth! (and Pete Ross Junior )

❤️ ✿❧🌿❧✿ ❤️

[iluvtennis]

10. Thanks for this article. As a former software engineer, I love that STEM gets some props on DU.

May Kathleen Booth Rest in Peace and May her Memory be a Blessing.

[littlemissmartypants]

11. ...

[Hekate]

12. RIP and thanks for a life well lived

[jmowreader]

13. So, what the heck is assembly language?

Computers are, at their root, stupid things. They can add one number to another, subtract one number from another, and compare two numbers to see which one’s bigger. They can also take a number and add or subtract one from it. What makes them smart things is that all that adding, subtracting and comparing can be chained together to allow us to type “throw Trump in prison and never let him out.”

Worse, a computer is made out of millions of switches that can be either on or off. If a switch is on, we call it a 1. If it’s off it’s called a 0. These switches are arranged into little data banks called registers.

To tell a computer to add one to a number in a specific register, you might have to tell it “01001010”. That’s a pain in the ass to remember, and a computer has lots of instructions. So, people invented systems that took more human-friendly numbers and translated them into computer-friendly ones. The first was octal, which uses three “binary digits” and has octal digits between 0 (000) and 7 (111). This command then becomes 112. Then someone realized computers use word lengths that are divisible by four and created hexadecimal, which uses four bits and has hex digits between 0 and 15…but since you can’t go past 9 with a single digit 10 is written as A, 11 written as B and so on until 15 is written as F. Now you can type in 59 for that command.

Which still sucks.

What Kathleen Booth decided is computers should be able to do a little bit of this work and wrote a program that lets a person type INC into her computer instead of 01001010, 112 or 59. The computer would translate INC to 01001010. Still not great, but way easier to remember. And then people like Grace Hopper could use assembly language - so called because the translation function is called assembling the program - to write high level languages like COBOL.

People wrote assembly language programs after high level languages were available because assembly language gives smaller programs that run faster.

[scipan]

16. Nice explanation.

I used to code in assembly language back in the day. We had to debug in octal.

[cbabe]

14. Women invented eniac programming

https://ethw.org › Women_Computers_in_World_War_II
Women Computers in World War II - ETHW

When the ENIAC was nearing completion, six women were chosen from among the human computers to be trained**
as programmers. These were Kay McNulty, Frances Bilas, Betty Jean Jennings, Elizabeth Snyder, Ruth Lichterman, and Marlyn Wescoff. By this time, it was the autumn of 1945. The war had ended, but the computing program was not cancelled.


https://m.imdb.com › title › tt1587359
Top Secret Rosies: The Female 'Computers' of WWII - IMDb

Documentary War In 1942, when computers were human and women were underestimated, a group of female mathematicians helped win a war and usher in the modern computer age. Sixty-five years later their story has finally been told. Director LeAnn Erickson Writer Cynthia Baughman Stars Jean Jennings Bartik Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer Shirley Melvin

…

** not ‘trained’. They created the programming. Somehow still can’t get it right when crediting women.