Andrew Donald Booth

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

Life

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

In 1947 he visited ( accompanied by his assistant and future wife, Kathleen Britten ) with a Rockefeller Fellowship John von Neumann Computer Group in Princeton. According to von Neumann's ideas, he built for the ARC project and invented, as he had no great resources available, a separate magnetic drum memory. 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 received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation ( Warren Weaver) for the construction of a computer for automatic language translation at Birkbeck College, and in the coming years, where he developed a center for this research, which was heavily promoted during the Cold War, and Booth did research on this area. In the late 1940s he had ideas to electronic desktop calculators, which he had realized from his student Norman Kitz ( SEC, Simple Electronic Calculator ). Fawn built in 1961 the first commercially available electronic desktop calculator ( Anita ). In 1951 the All Purpose Electronic Computer (APEC ). For him, he developed a he invented multiplier ( Booth Multiplier ), excited by a divisional unit that he met John von Neumann. She found the entrance to the 1951 Hollerith Electronic Computer (HEC ) from British Tabulating Machines ( BTM). The computers of the series ( HEC4, later ICT 1200 series ) were in the late 1950s, the best-selling British computer. Booth self-developed next to the MAC (Magnetic Automatic Calculator ), he created in his company.

In 1962 he went to Canada, since one at Birkbeck College denied him a professorship. He went to the University of Saskatchewan and was 1972-1978 President of Lakehead University in Ontario.

Writings

  • 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
  • Published by William N. Locke: Machine translation of languages ​​. Fourteen essays. MIT Press, Wiley 1955
November 29 Binary multiplier James H. Wilkinson National Physical Laboratory (United Kingdom) Tom Kilburn Integrated Authority File
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