Yesterday, at the age of 100 deceased British programmer who created the foundation of programming language and concept later known as assembly. In the late 1940s, Kathleen Booth invented a British computer programming language called ARC, which greatly simplified the representation and interpretation of machine instructions.

Booth is him Found out He originally called the form of coding that best describes the form of representation of instructions in assembly language “contracted notation”, i.e. “condensed/combined notation” – because it is essentially a reduced, “pure” textual form of textual description. Machine code functions. A couple of co-researchers finally gave the notation form the name “assembly”, which is still used today.

Kathleen Booth with the APEXC computer in 1953

A book she wrote and published in 1958 titled “Programming for an Automatic Digital Calculator” explaining the basics of programming is believed to be the first book on programming written by a woman.

At the same time, this year he also began to deal with the subject of neural circuits, with the help of which he was able to write programs that imitated the recognition of the sight and shape of animals. The procedures he developed are the basis of the technology we now refer to as image or object recognition based on machine learning or artificial intelligence.

Kathleen Booth later became a university lecturer, and then with her husband – mathematician and physicist Andrew Donald Booth, the inventor of the first computerized drum library, he worked, among other things, on the creation of ARC. – They immigrated to Canada, where they worked as university lecturers until their retirement years.

Her husband died in 2009 at the age of 91, and Kathleen followed him almost three months after her 100th birthday on September 29 this year.