[HN Gopher] Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language, h...
___________________________________________________________________
Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language, has died
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 873 points
Date : 2022-10-29 14:07 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| aliqot wrote:
| Rest in peace, thank you for the path you cleared for the rest of
| us. Your legacy will outlive all of us.
| blacksqr wrote:
| RET
| 867-5309 wrote:
| ^assembly for RIP?
| sweetbitter wrote:
| NOP
| mikro2nd wrote:
| She invented Assembler language! This one really deserves a HN
| "black header" imho.
| highwaylights wrote:
| 100% behind this, if ever the header was warranted for a post I
| believe this to be it.
| divbzero wrote:
| For future record, HN admins added a black bar to the header
| shortly after the comments in this subthread.
| math-dev wrote:
| Thanks for noting this. We are so accustomed to reading
| comments as of a point in time, but their meaning is also
| impacted by when they are made. In this case, a future
| historian may draw a different conclusion had they not seen
| your clarifying post. Whereas now it confirms that the
| community viewed it as a good thing, and HN also agreed
| steadfastly.
| aaron695 wrote:
| math-dev wrote:
| I hope to see it. RIP
| mdp2021 wrote:
| (Typo. 'Assembly', "contracted notation", is a language. Made
| to make human readable the elements of those pieces of binary
| information that the 'Assembler', executed code, assembles.)
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| It is a very significant step worthy of note in computing
| history.
|
| The difference between raw machine op codes and a nicely
| formatted asm with whitespace/columns is quite a leap, if
| you've ever programmed that way.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| My mother did. She programmed in octal. She told me, more
| than once, how nice it was when she got an assembler.
| morelisp wrote:
| Not a typo. Both the process and the notation has been called
| "assembler" and "assembly".
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _has been called_
|
| For that matter, language in use has a "descriptive" side
| overwhelmingly larger than the "prescriptive" side.
|
| Now, the "assembler" is that thing which takes program
| components - say, a loop, an array of data and a subroutine
| - and concatenates them, e.g. fixing addressing (see
| Wilkes, Wheeler and Gill 1951) - you have to compute, for
| specification e.g. in the loop, at which address the data
| and the subroutine will start. The result is hence an
| "assembly".
|
| Assembling was a clerical work. And famously (or notably),
| when Donald Gilles wrote an automated assembler, John von
| Neumann protested that "to have computers perform clerical
| work is a waste of precious resources".
|
| But since at some point you got a piece of software to
| assemble the chunks, you can then think of adding an
| interpreter to translate machine operation mnemonics into
| machine code. So its syntax becomes "the language for the
| assembler", and "assembly language" would be "the language
| to obtain an assembly". Both expressions are weak, and I do
| not know historical details in their use. Some adopted the
| use of 'assembly' for the language to reserve 'assembler'
| for the processing program.
| rvz wrote:
| Exactly. Very surprising that there is no black bar for her.
| There should be.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| +1.
|
| Hey @dang, care to do it?
| detaro wrote:
| "@dang" doesnt do anything. email him if you want his
| attention.
| MarcellusDrum wrote:
| Honestly at this point, it should, as it is widely used.
| Maybe a page where be can see all the mentions so he can
| check them if he has time, not something disruptive like an
| email notification for every mention obviously.
| boredtofears wrote:
| There's a lot of things that are standard features that
| aren't here - the lack of @'ing, notifications,
| followers, etc are all things I like about HN.
| biohax2015 wrote:
| Yes, no way that can go wrong
| KMnO4 wrote:
| While there's probably no backend functionality, I would
| bet he has a feed set up to find comments containing the
| phrase "dang".
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&q
| u...
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Emailed and it appears the site was updated.
| herodotus wrote:
| I wrote my first "big" program in assembly language (IBM/360): it
| was a program to print parse trees for an arbitrary grammars.
| This was around 1970. The clever bit was to print in a way that
| let me tape the printout pages side by side if the tree branches
| exceeded the 128 (or was it 256?) character limit of the printer.
|
| The IBM printers were fun: you could get them to play simple
| tunes by printing repeating characters on a line.
| magoghm wrote:
| I remember printers with 132 characters per line.
| breck wrote:
| Do you still have that program? Would love to read it.
| herodotus wrote:
| Sorry, no.
| m12k wrote:
| Between pioneers like Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper and Kathleen
| Booth, it's still weird to me that IT has ended up becoming a
| male dominated industry.
| amyjess wrote:
| Computing was originally seen as clerical work, and it was one
| of the few acceptable career paths to women even before the
| social upheaval of the '60s.
|
| What changed was when home computers became widely available,
| causing society as a whole to redefine how they saw computing.
| Marketing campaign after marketing campaign promoted computers
| as a boys' hobby, with consumer software being dominated by
| games centered around playing sports and shooting things, and
| nearly all ads for those games showed them being played by
| boys. Rather than a clerical field, computers were now the
| latest expensive toys for boys. Computing was presented as "the
| cool new thing" to boys, and since marketing campaigns targeted
| boys pretty much exclusively, it gave girls the impression
| computing was a boys' club where girls weren't welcome. And
| since girls didn't feel welcome, they got out. The tipping
| point of this was in 1984, when the number of Computer Science
| degrees awarded to women peaked and then sharply fell off; it
| was so bad, the number didn't flatline until the very late
| '00s.
|
| There have been a few articles on the phenomenon:
|
| * https://www.engadget.com/2014-10-20-what-happened-to-all-
| of-...
|
| * https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/2875/why-
| did...
|
| * https://www.codefellows.org/blog/1984-year-women-left-
| coding...
| divbzero wrote:
| Another article on the same phenomenon:
|
| * https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-
| resu...
| sizzzzlerz wrote:
| Not only seen as clerical, the women who did the work were
| collectively known as "computers". These computers filled
| vital roles during both world wars, being tasked with
| computing the trajectories of shells fired from cannons in
| the first to working with the mathematicians of Bletchley
| Park, in England, with solving the decryption of the German
| Enigma machine. Even as late as the 1960s, women, primarily
| black women, were employed by NASA to perform a variety of
| complex and utterly essential calculations that predicted
| where the rockets were to go during the manned space program.
| It's really only been within the last 20 years are so that
| they have achieved the recognition and acclaim they most
| assuredly earned.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| > Computing was originally seen as clerical work,
|
| Because it largely was. What people originally called
| "computers" were actually people doing manual calculations:
|
| https://www.history.com/news/human-computers-women-at-nasa
|
| During the world wars in the 20th century, most of those
| "computers" were women since men were more directly involved
| in the war:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)#Wartime_.
| ..
|
| > As electrical computers became more available, human
| computers, especially women, were drafted as some of the
| first computer programmers.[47] Because the six people
| responsible for setting up problems on the ENIAC (the first
| general-purpose electronic digital computer built at the
| University of Pennsylvania during World War II) were drafted
| from a corps of human computers, the world's first
| professional computer programmers were women, namely: Kay
| McNulty, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty
| Jean Jennings, and Fran Bilas.[48]
| ilaksh wrote:
| My mother was a computer in a bank for a period of time.
| userbinator wrote:
| _Marketing campaign after marketing campaign promoted
| computers as a boys ' hobby_
|
| I don't think so, at least in the early years of personal
| computing; look at these 80s computer ads and see how many
| females are in them:
|
| https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/retro-computer-ads-
| from-198...
| searealist wrote:
| It's unfortunate that this is the top comment, a low effort
| virtue signaling post, when there are others that are actually
| talking about Kathleen's life.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Do you believe Kathleen wouldn't want to be considered in
| this way and didn't regret the current state of tech for
| women? I sort of suspect she would be honored by the pantheon
| inclusion and strongly agree with the sentiment. Respecting
| someone who has passed isn't only done by recounting their
| biography.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| What's the purpose of this comment other than to signal a
| different virtue?
| uni_rule wrote:
| Possibly to signal a lack of self awareness.
| searealist wrote:
| It's no longer the top comment. Mission accomplished.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| > Mission accomplished.
|
| Wait, have you actually managed to convince yourself that
| your comment was responsible for that? Despite the fact
| that your comment was quickly downvoted down the parent's
| comments?
|
| Edit: seems pretty doubtful that your comment had a
| negative impact on the parent given that your own comment
| was overall downvoted. Personally, I skimmed the parent
| comment, then read yours, rolled my eyes to the back of
| my skull, then upvoted the parent.
| [deleted]
| searealist wrote:
| Do I think I contributed to it? Yes.
| [deleted]
| ZGDUwpqEWpUZ wrote:
| > Grace Hopper and Kathleen Booth
|
| WWII might have had some effect on what young men were doing
| when those two got their start.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| It's a solitary activity and it seems men are more prone to
| living single, solitary lifestyles and see no decline in
| lifestyle moving into IT. Conversely, women tend to be
| hardwired to be more social and gravitate toward more social
| jobs like nursing.
|
| The real question is why more men don't enter nursing since it
| would allow them the social lifestyle that they don't have and
| won't get going into IT. Both fields pay about the same
| starting salary too.
| rexpop wrote:
| > It's a solitary activity and it seems men are more prone to
| living single, solitary lifestyles
|
| Software development is not a solitary activity, it is a
| highly social and collaborative activity, and besides that,
| introversion is no less prevalent in women than in men.
| darthoctopus wrote:
| That the field became male-dominated once computing became
| simultaneously expensive and highly profitable should be
| entirely unsurprising.
| david-gpu wrote:
| Isn't medicine expensive, highly profitable and significantly
| female-dominated these days?
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Not in my experience, the more senior roles are still
| skewed towards men.
| paxys wrote:
| Medicine is not at all female dominated, just certain
| categories in it like nursing and pharma sales reps. If you
| move up the ladder of money and influence, you will find
| that the majority of doctors, administrators, CEOs etc. are
| very much male.
|
| Breaking down just doctors, the profession is 2/3 male, and
| within it women lean towards specialties like gynecology,
| pediatrics and palliative medicine while the most
| prestigious ones like various kinds of surgery and
| radiology are male dominated.
| darthoctopus wrote:
| 1. these days 2. nursing may be female-dominated, but the
| gender ratio of doctors (for whom the industry is
| significantly more profitable) is still heavily skewed
| towards men, is it not?
| GavinMcG wrote:
| Not as to doctors: https://www.aamc.org/data-
| reports/workforce/interactive-data...
|
| Nursing (which is a huge industry of course) is the notable
| exception within medicine. But it's still subordinate.
| klipt wrote:
| Working physicians is a trailing indicator. The leading
| indicator is MD _students_ which have been majority women
| for years now.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| But what proportions will actually work as doctors?
| klipt wrote:
| I assume most of them have to, for at least some years,
| to pay off their medical school loans.
| adwn wrote:
| > _once computing became [...] expensive_
|
| At what point in time do you think computing became more
| expensive than it was before? If anything, the cost of
| computing has been strictly monotonically decreasing since
| the very first programmable computer.
| darthoctopus wrote:
| Indeed. My personal pet theory is that this combination
| (expensive + unprofitable) might have been why so many
| early pioneers of computing were female in the first place.
| adwn wrote:
| > _My personal pet theory is that this combination
| (expensive + unprofitable) might have been why so many
| early pioneers of computing were female in the first
| place._
|
| That doesn't make any sense. Just 10 minutes before
| you've claimed that computing became male-dominated
| because it was expensive:
|
| > _That the field became male-dominated once computing
| became simultaneously expensive and highly profitable
| should be entirely unsurprising._
|
| and now you claim that it was female-dominated at first
| because it was expensive?
| darthoctopus wrote:
| > simultaneously expensive and highly profitable
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Maybe because it's largely populated by people trained in CS,
| which in turn is rooted in the fairly male-dominated field of
| math.
| klipt wrote:
| * Breadwinning is associated with the male gender role, so men
| face more social pressures to be breadwinners than women do.
| (The proportion of men who e.g. stay at home to parent is much
| smaller than women, and it's likely fewer women are willing to
| date a man with that goal, compared to the number of men
| willing to date a woman with that goal.)
|
| * Once IT became a big industry with lots of good paying jobs,
| it became extremely attractive to breadwinners.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Then why aren't single women dominant in tech? You seem to
| have the assumptions :
|
| 1) women are uniformly incentivized against making the most
| money for their time possible 2) women have children 3) women
| are married 4) ... to men Etc.
|
| Given women were very prevalent in tech until about the
| advent of the home computer maybe the fact home computers
| were only marketed to and for boys and the computer was
| installed in the boys room?
| rexpop wrote:
| > why aren't single women dominant in tech?
|
| Because single women are equally subject to workplace
| hostility: men "don't discriminate" when we discriminate.
| klipt wrote:
| > women are uniformly incentivized against making the most
| money for their time possible
|
| What makes you assume men and women are working the same
| amount of time? Labor statistics show that men work more
| overtime and women are more likely to work part time.
|
| Which fits the hypothesis that men are socially judged more
| by their breadwinning and women are socially judged more by
| things like having the flexible time to be a good mom.
|
| > ... to men
|
| I'm taking about statistical trends, nobody said _all_
| women are married to men, but lesbians are a tiny minority
| compared to straight women. Even if all lesbians adopted
| masculine gender roles, that wouldn 't change the fact that
| the _majority_ of women follow female gender roles.
| [deleted]
| rexpop wrote:
| > Breadwinning is associated with the male gender
|
| The passive voice is undermining your point, here.
|
| _Patriarchal ideology_ associates breadwinning with the male
| gender and men, fearful in light of the aforementioned social
| pressures, are uniquely hostile to women who, under
| patriarchy, our society has agreed to side-line as a class.
| [deleted]
| klipt wrote:
| Then it seems the main _enforcers_ of "patriarchal
| ideology" are those straight women who prefer to date men
| who are successful breadwinners over men who aim to be stay
| at home dads.
| rexpop wrote:
| Women aren't obligated to have sex with anyone in
| particular, and it's extremely worrying how prevalent
| this opposition to romantic freedom has become in online
| discourse.
|
| It's worthwhile to explore _from where_ these social
| pressures arrive. Parents, teachers, peers, religious
| authorities, bosses, and advertising come to mind. I
| wonder where you 'd rank the influence of all these? For
| reference, don't hesitate to look into bell hooks "The
| Will to Change;"[0] as feminist texts go, it's extremely
| sympathetic to men. I think you'll find a lot to agree
| with, right off the bat.
|
| 0. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17601.The_Will_to_
| Change
| klipt wrote:
| > Women aren't obligated to have sex with anyone in
| particular
|
| Who said women (or men) are? But who people choose to
| date is _obviously_ a very strong source of societal
| pressure. Have you not heard of "sexual selection"?
|
| If men refused to date women who wear pants, that would
| be strong pressure on women to wear dresses instead.
|
| If women refuse to date stay at home dads, that's strong
| pressure on men to be breadwinners instead.
| ZGDUwpqEWpUZ wrote:
| > Women aren't obligated to have sex with anyone in
| particular
|
| Of course not, don't be ridiculous. That doesn't change
| the effect of their preferences, though.
|
| And, of course men's preferences also have an effect on
| women. There's no need to be defensive (or aggressive)
| here.
|
| > Parents, teachers
|
| Which gender are those mostly? Who is buying girls Barbie
| dolls and boys Action Man?
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| OK, now rationalize the ratio of men:women who program as a
| hobby.
| manofmanysmiles wrote:
| Often hobbies are at least adjacent to careers in my
| experience.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| That's why so many programmers paint small science
| fiction figurines obsessively.
| userbinator wrote:
| It is only "male dominated" in the West. Look in the East (both
| Asia and former USSR) and you'll see far more females working
| in the computing/electronics industry.
| NorSoulx wrote:
| For me, coding in Assembly language during the C64 and Amiga
| Demo-scene in the 80s is the major reason that I went on to study
| Computer Science and ended up working as a system developer for
| the past 30+ years. One of my fondest memories from my developer
| experience is writing the first Amiga Demo Creator entirely in
| Assembly language back in May 1987:
|
| https://coding-and-computers.blogspot.com/2022/05/first-amig...
| trollied wrote:
| Amazing, thank you for sharing
| le-mark wrote:
| Richard Hamming called what we now know as assembler "automatic
| programming":
|
| > I give you a story from my own private life. Early on it became
| evident to me that Bell Laboratories was not going to give me the
| conventional acre of programming people to program computing
| machines in absolute binary. It was clear they weren't going to.
| But that was the way everybody did it. I could go to the West
| Coast and get a job with the airplane companies without any
| trouble, but the exciting people were at Bell Labs and the
| fellows out there in the airplane companies were not. I thought
| for a long while about, "Did I want to go or not?" and I wondered
| how I could get the best of two possible worlds. I finally said
| to myself, "Hamming, you think the machines can do practically
| everything. Why can't you make them write programs?" What
| appeared at first to me as a defect forced me into automatic
| programming very early. What appears to be a fault, often, by a
| change of viewpoint, turns out to be one of the greatest assets
| you can have. But you are not likely to think that when you first
| look the thing and say, "Gee, I'm never going to get enough
| programmers, so how can I ever do any great programming?"
|
| https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jrex/teaching/spring2005/fft/h...
| stoolpigeon wrote:
| Is it assembly he is talking about or Hamming Distance and
| correcting binary?
|
| If it's the former are you saying he claimed to have invented
| assembly?
|
| It's an interesting speech and I'm glad you posted it but I'm
| struggling to understand the connection to Booth
| agumonkey wrote:
| Assembler then early NNets and then more NNets, I find careers at
| that time quite wilder than today. Kinda like the FORTRAN team
| using ad-hoc markov chains for register allocation (IIRC) just
| out of curiosity.
| unfunco wrote:
| I sadly hadn't heard of her, and her Wikipedia page has no
| mention of any state awards such as an OBE or MBE (maybe she
| might have refused them) and she likely died in the window where
| there was no 100th birthday card from the Queen/King.
| js2 wrote:
| Here's an article with some more details about how she came to
| invent assembly language. This is a "necessity is the mother of
| invention" tale that I always find fascinating starting with
| "Andrew Booth, whom Kathleen would eventually marry, had
| previously done X-ray crystallography research at the University
| of Birmingham and that included doing a lot of computations. This
| started him down the path of building computing machines to make
| the work easier.":
|
| https://hackaday.com/2018/08/21/kathleen-booth-assembling-ea...
| [deleted]
| mdp2021 wrote:
| I would just like to note that I collect RSS feeds from a large
| number of sources, and none of them contained this non-trivial
| piece of news (I just did a search on the database).
|
| I just checked on the websites of the NYT, on the Guardian -
| nothing.
|
| It is like in typical treatment of History: progress is at or
| beyond the margin.
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| The Register itself has an RSS feed, you could add that to your
| collection
| divbzero wrote:
| Her relative obscurity highlights how we stand upon shoulders
| of more giants than we are aware.
| stoolpigeon wrote:
| I just looked at the Wikipedia article about her and it appears
| her and her husband were often overlooked while making huge
| contributions.
| pctrsq0perenl wrote:
| It is extremely sad how the _sciency_ or tech media largely
| ignores the demise of computer scientists and engineers who
| contributed a lot to the field. Most of them face a lack of
| recognition outside their immediate co-workers in their
| lifetime as well. The foreshadowing of Dennis Ritchie 's death
| was the most flagrant one that comes to mind immediately.
|
| I know that many great scientists and engineers have
| unfortunately been left in the depths of history, but I also
| believe that the people who contributed to the foundations of
| our modern digital world should be known by outsiders as well.
| hidroto wrote:
| in late 2011 my teacher was giving a motivational speech
| about steve jobs and i was the only one to recognize jobs
| from an old photo the teacher showed us. so even the more
| public facing influences are not widely recognized for there
| past works.
|
| I also feel ritchie's death was overshadowed by jobs death,
| despite his life having a more fundamental impact on this
| industry.
| Veen wrote:
| I learned of her death when The Telegraph published her
| obituary last Tuesday, but it's paywalled. I haven't seen her
| death mentioned elsewhere either.
|
| https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2022/10/25/kathleen-b...
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/avCeI
| timthorn wrote:
| And that obituary was submitted to HN multiple times.
| jfk13 wrote:
| The _Times_ also had one:
| https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/kathleen-booth-
| obituary-s...
| ghastmaster wrote:
| It was mentioned on reddit August 18, 2022. How this person
| came to this conclusion is unknown. There is no source.
| Notably, this is more than a month before her death. Strange.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/ws3kk1/kat.
| ..
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| khaledh wrote:
| If you're interested, you can find a link below to Kathleen
| Booth's original report from 1947 titled "Coding for A.R.C."
| (authored with her -later- husband Andrew Booth)[0]. It details
| how coding is done for that machine, with a very early form of
| symbolic instructions that closely resembles what we know as
| assembly language today. You can see at the end of the report the
| mapping between machine codes and symbols.
|
| That being said, there doesn't seem to be indication of building
| an actual assembler, i.e. a program that reads symbolic
| instructions and produces machine code. AFAIK, the first
| assembler was built by David Wheeler for the EDSAC.
|
| https://albert.ias.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.12111/7941/Bo...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| bnralt wrote:
| Indeed, the IEEE credits David Wheeler with the creation of the
| first assembly language, for which they awarded him a computer
| pioneer award in 1985[1]:
|
| > Wheeler's "initial orders" allowed Edsac instructions to be
| provided in a simple language rather than by writing binary
| numbers, and made it possible for non-specialists to begin to
| write programs. This was the first "assembly language" and was
| the direct precursor of every modern programming language, all
| of which derive from the desire to let programmers write
| instructions in a legible form that can then be translated into
| computer-readable binary.
|
| [1] https://www.computer.org/profiles/david-wheeler
| pishpash wrote:
| And that's the same Wheeler in the Burrows-Wheeler transform.
| [deleted]
| pishpash wrote:
| Having read the materials, it seems misleading to call it the
| invention of assembly language. More like the invention of
| machine programming, i.e. what the paper calls "coding of
| problems", i.e. turning a problem into machine code.
|
| The mapping of machine code to symbols seems completely
| ancillary, and as a side comment says, without the
| demonstration of an assembler and an intent to translate in the
| other direction, it is premature to say any language has been
| invented, vs. notation for writing a paper.
| haltingproblem wrote:
| The hackaday reference below says she built an assembler. Given
| how little we know of her achievements and give her credit for
| those, I would err on the side of crediting her rather than the
| other interpretation. But just my opinion:)
| breck wrote:
| For some reason it never dawned on me that Arc might be named
| after KB.
|
| https://pldb.com/languages/arc-assembly.html
| andybak wrote:
| Christ. I thought I knew a reasonable amount about this. I've
| read biographies of Turing and Von Neumann and multiple popular
| histories of the birth of computing and computer science.
|
| But I've never heard this story before.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| One of the most amazing things to me, and my fascination with
| computers, was that you could actually _talk to_ the people that
| invented them, unlike steam engines, or cars, where the original
| inventors are long gone.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Fwiw Kathleen Booth was one of the featured obituaries in _Last
| Word_ on BBC Radio 4 this week:
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001ddyh
| DrBazza wrote:
| For all of El Reg's tongue-in-cheek reporting style, they do a
| tip-top job on obituaries.
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/24/in_memoriam_stephen_w...
| https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/17/sir_clive_sinclair_ob...
|
| and so on...
| david-gpu wrote:
| Never heard of her until today. RIP.
|
| Having programmed a fair amount in assembly and occasionally in
| raw machine code, I would estimate at least a 10x productivity
| increase when an assembler is available. I would not contest if
| somebody suggested it's more like 100x. A massive milestone in
| the history of computing, without a doubt.
| jimpick wrote:
| Dr. Booth (her late husband) was one of my engineering professors
| back at the University of Victoria back in the early '90s. It's
| amazing that modern CPUs still use the multiplication circuits he
| created (along with his wife). Also one of several people that
| can claim to have created the first spinning magnetic storage!
| DogLover_ wrote:
| Never heard of her before now. Surprising given the impact of
| assembly.
| abudabi123 wrote:
| 95014_refugee wrote:
| .
| ronnier wrote:
| > Professor Kathleen Booth, one of the last of the early British
| computing pioneers, has died. She was 100.
|
| Wow long life. I didn't know you until now, RIP.
| BobMackay wrote:
| Here is their 1947 paper on Principles and Progress in the
| Construction of High-Speed Digital Computers:
| http://bobmackay.com/Booth/Booth.html
| photochemsyn wrote:
| That's a great find, it should be required reading for every
| intro to architecture and assembly course! I stumbled for a
| second over 'serial vs. parallel' but then realized it just
| meant a parallel data bus.
| BobMackay wrote:
| Thanks. My copy was actually the copy that they sent to J.D.
| Bernal, and was signed over to him "with the compliments of
| the authors". My father was another PhD student of Bernal's,
| and became Professor of Crystallography at Birkbeck later.
| The diagrams are scanned in from the original, but I re-typed
| the text for web presentation. It is astonishing how much of
| Computer Science was completely understood by the end of the
| war.
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