Andrew Donald Booth

Andrew Donald Booth (born February 11, 1918 - November 29, 2009 ) was a British computer pioneer.

Life

Booth grew up in Weybridge , Surrey . From 1937 he studied mathematics with a scholarship at Cambridge University (Jesus College). He left Cambridge without a degree (but received an external degree from the University of London) and turned from pure mathematics to applied subjects. From 1943 to 1945 he worked as a theoretical physicist in an X-ray crystallography group in research for the British Rubber Producers Research Association in Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire and received his PhD in X-ray crystallography of explosives from the University of Birmingham in 1944 . In 1945 he went to the group of John Desmond Bernal at Birkbeck College, University of London. The extensive calculations required for crystallography led him to build some of the first electronic calculators in Great Britain there, having previously used analog calculators. First he built a relay computer (Automatic Relay Calculator, ARC).

In 1947 he visited John von Neumann's computer group in Princeton on a Rockefeller grant (accompanied by his assistant and later wife Kathleen Britten ). According to von Neumann's ideas, he rebuilt the ARC project and, as he did not have large resources, invented his own magnetic drum storage. The prototype of this first rotating computer memory is in the Science Museum in London. The production took place in a company that he founded with his father.

He has received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation ( Warren Weaver ) to build a computer for automatic language translation at Birkbeck College, and in the coming years a center for this research, which was heavily funded during the Cold War, developed there, and Booth did research too this area. At the end of the 1940s he had ideas for electronic desktop calculators , which he had his student Norman Kitz put into practice (SEC, Simple Electronic Calculator). In 1961 Kitz built the first commercially available electronic desktop calculator (Anita). In 1951 the All Purpose Electronic Computer (APEC) followed. For him he developed a multiplier unit (Booth Multiplier) that he had invented , inspired by a division unit that he got to know from John von Neumann. It found its way into the Hollerith Electronic Computer (HEC) from British Tabulating Machines (BTM) in 1951. The computers in the series (HEC4, later ICT 1200 series) were the best-selling British computers in the late 1950s. Booth himself next developed the MAC (Magnetic Automatic Calculator), which he manufactured in his company.

In 1962 he went to Canada because he was refused a professorship at Birkbeck College. He went to the University of Saskatchewan and was President of Lakehead University in Ontario from 1972 to 1978 .

Fonts

• Fourier technique in x-ray organic structure analysis, Cambridge University Press 1948
• Mechanical resolution of linguistic problems, Academic Press 1958
• with Kathleen HV Booth: Automatic digital calculators, Butterworths 1953, 1965
• Automation and Computing, London 1958
• Digital computers in action, Pergamon Press 1965
• as editor: Machine translation, North Holland 1967
• Numerical methods, Butterworths, 1955, 3rd edition 1966
• Editor with William N. Locke: Machine translation of languages. Fourteen essays. MIT Press, Wiley 1955

Web links

• Roger G. Johnson: Andrew D. Booth. Britain's other fourth man (PDF)

References and comments

1. ↑ There were three other groups at that time, led by Maurice Wilkes in Cambridge, Jim Wilkinson and Ted Newman at the National Physical Laboratory (ACE project, based on the ideas of Alan Turing ) and the group of Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn in Manchester
2. ↑ An English electronic brain. In:  Weltpresse. Independent news and voices from all over the world / world press , November 9, 1946, p. 3 (online at ANNO ).
3. ↑ Received at the Thinktank Museum in Birmingham .
4. ^ After the merger of BMT with Powers SAMAS.