Professor Kathleen Booth, one of the last of the early British computing pioneers, has died. She was 100.
In 1950, Kathleen and Andrew married, the same year that she got a PhD in applied mathematics, again from the University of London. To secure further funding for their work, the Booths again went to the Rockefeller Foundation, which provided it on condition that the APE(C)X worked with human languages as well as just mathematics. The result was a demonstration of machine translation in November 1955.
As well as building the hardware for the first machines, she wrote all the software for the ARC2 and SEC machines, in the process inventing what she called “Contracted Notation” and would later be known as assembly language.
See https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/29/kathleen_booth_obit/
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