Background
Kathleen Booth was born in Stourbridge, Worcestershire, England.
Kathleen Booth was born in Stourbridge, Worcestershire, England.
Kathleen Booth worked at Birkbeck College, 1946-1962. She traveled to the United States as Andrew Booth"s research assistant in 1947, visiting with John von Neumann at Princeton. Upon returning to the United Kingdom, she co-authored "General Considerations in the Design of an All Purpose Electronic Digital Computer," describing modifications to the original American Red Cross redesign to the ARC2 using a von Neumann architecture.
Participant of her contribution was the American Red Cross assembly language.
She also built and maintained American Red Cross components. Kathleen and Andrew Booth"s team at Birkbeck were considered the smallest of the early British computer groups.
From 1947 to 1953, they produced three machines: American Red Cross (Automatic Relay Computer), Securities and Exchange Commission (Simple Electronic Computer), and APE(X)C (All-purpose Electronic (Rayon) Computer). She and Mr. Booth worked on the same team
He built the computers and she programmed them.
Although APE(X)C eventually led to the Higher Education Commission series manufactured by the British Tabulating Machine Company, the small scale of the Birkbeck group did not place it in the front rank of British computer activity. Booth regularly published papers concerning her work on the American Red Cross and APE(X)C systems and co-wrote "Automatic Digital Calculators" (1953) which illustrated the "Planning and Coding" programming style. She co-founded the School of Computer Science and Information Systems in 1957 at Birkbeck College along with Andrew Booth and J.C. Jennings.
In 1958, she taught a Programming course.
In 1958, Booth wrote a book describing how to program APE(X)C computers. Booth"s research on neural networks led to successful programs simulating ways in which animals recognize patterns and recognize character.
Type 1400 Computer was donated to the Department of Numerical Automation but was in fact installed in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.