Andrew Donald Booth
British computer scientist (1918–2009)
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Early life
Andrew Donald Booth was born on February 11, 1918, in East Molesy, Surrey, UK. He was the son of Sidney Booth (died 1955) and a cousin of Sir Felix Booth.
He was raised in Weybridge, Surrey, and educated at Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School. In 1937, he won a scholarship to read mathematics at Jesus College, Cambridge. Booth left Cambridge without taking a degree, having become disaffected with pure mathematics as a subject. He chose an external degree from the University of London instead, which he obtained with a first.
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Career
From 1943 to 1945, Booth worked as a mathematical physicist in the X-ray team at the British Rubber Producers' Research Association (BRPRA), Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, gaining his PhD in crystallography from the University of Birmingham in 1944. In 1945, he moved to Birkbeck College, University of London, where his work in the crystallography group led him to build some of the first electronic computers in the United Kingdom including the All Purpose Electronic Computer, first installed at the British Rayon Research Association. Booth founded Birkbeck's department of numerical automation and was named a fellow at the university in 2004. He also did early pioneering work in machine translation.
After World War II, he worked on crystallographic problems research at Birkbeck College and constructed a Fourier synthesis device. He was then introduced to the work of Alan Turing and John von Neumann on logical automata by Douglas Hartree.
The first assembly code in which a language is used to represent machine code instructions is found in Kathleen and Andrew Donald Booth's 1947 work, Coding for A.R.C.. Assembly code is converted into executable machine code by a utility program referred to as an assembler. The term "assembler" is generally attributed to Wilkes, Wheeler and Gill in their 1951 book The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer, who, however, used the term to mean "a program that assembles another program consisting of several sections into a single program". The conversion process is referred to as assembly, as in assembling the source code. The computational step when an assembler is processing a program is called assembly time.
Booth served as President of Lakehead University from 1972 to 1978.
Personal life
Booth married mathematician and computer engineer Kathleen Britten in 1950, and had two children, Amanda and Ian; between 1947 and 1953, together they produced three computing machines.